The Zeus Mode credit line

You may have seen one of the two lines below on a commit or a pull request. This page says what they mean, why they are there, and how to turn them off.

The two lines

On a commit, in the last paragraph of the message:

Coordinated-By: Zeus Mode (https://zeusmode.ai)

In the text of a pull request:

Coordinated by [Zeus Mode (zeusmode.ai)](https://zeusmode.ai)

What they mean

Zeus Mode is a Mac app for people who work with the AI coding agents Claude Code and Codex. It shows what each agent is doing, and it plans and coordinates work across several agents.

“Coordinated-By” means Zeus coordinated the work and did not write it. An agent wrote the change, for a person who uses Zeus. The line does not say Co-Authored-By, because a coordinator is not an author, and because some contributor-agreement checks block a co-author who never signed.

Only a commit made by an agent working with Zeus gets the line, and only a pull request such an agent opens. Zeus never adds it to a commit a person makes themselves, and it does not change old commits to add it. If a person amends or squashes an agent’s commit, the new message keeps whatever words that person keeps, so the line may stay. That is not a mistake. No feature of Zeus depends on the credit line, so removing it breaks nothing.

Why it is there

The line tells a reader how the change was made. It also names the product, and that is on purpose: it is one way people find Zeus. So it is on by default, and a repository that does not want it can turn it off. Only a repository has a switch for it.

Turn it off for a repository

In .claude/toolkit.yml, the file where a repository keeps its settings for Zeus, set credit to "off", and commit it:

credit: "off"

Agents in that repository then leave both lines out. credit: off, written without the quotes, works the same way. With no such line, or no such file, the lines are on. The setting belongs to the repository, so the result is the same whoever runs the agent.

If the file already has a credit line, change it, and do not add a second one. If it has none, add this line. If the file does not exist, create it with this one line.

Write credit at the very beginning of the line, with nothing before it. Agents skip a line that starts with #, even after spaces, because it is a comment. They also skip a line with spaces before credit, because in this file a line with spaces before it is part of the line above it. Here, credit is part of worktrees, so it is not the switch:

worktrees:
  credit: "off"

If the line you change is one of these, the lines stay on, and nothing tells you.

You can still ask for a single commit. If you tell an agent in a session to leave the commit line out of a commit, it leaves it out of that commit only, and its pull request says so.

The setting stops new lines only: commits already made keep theirs. It also covers only these two lines. With credit off, an agent may still write a Zeus-Part: line in a commit. That line tells Zeus that a part of the agent’s work is finished. It is not a credit line, so seeing one does not mean the switch failed. Only a project’s rules that forbid tool lines can stop Zeus-Part: lines (see the next section). The tool that runs an agent may also add lines of its own, such as Claude Code’s Co-Authored-By, and those have their own settings.

If you maintain a project that does not use Zeus, see the next section instead.

Where a project’s rules forbid tool lines

Before its first commit in a repository, an agent reads the project’s contribution rules: its CONTRIBUTING file (at the root, in .github/ or in docs/), any policy on AI use, and its pull request template. On a fork, it reads the rules of the original project too.

If those rules forbid tool lines or tool trailers (a trailer is a Key: value line at the end of a commit message), in any words, the agent leaves both lines out, writes no Zeus-Part: lines, and says nothing about Zeus in the pull request. A rule where the agent cannot tell whether it forbids tool lines counts as forbidding. A rule that only asks for a disclosure does not forbid them.

So if you maintain a project and do not want these lines, you need nothing from Zeus. One sentence in your CONTRIBUTING file is enough, such as “Do not add tool lines to commits or pull requests.” It stops Zeus’s lines. A line that the tool running the agent adds, such as Claude Code’s Co-Authored-By, follows that tool’s own settings, not Zeus’s rules, so it can still reach you.

A disclosure your project requires is never dropped, whether the credit is on or off. The agent writes it in your project’s own form. If your project asks for every tool used, the agent names Zeus there, as a plain fact with no link. Where your rules forbid tool lines, the disclosure is the only place Zeus is named. Where they only ask for the disclosure, the two lines follow the repository’s setting: with credit on, they appear beside the disclosure, and with credit off, they do not.

These are written rules that agents follow, and no program checks them, so an agent can make a mistake. If a credit line reaches you that should not have, remove it.

How many carry the line

We count three things: public commits that carry the line, pull requests that carry it, and repositories where it appears.

The counts come from GitHub’s search. One search returns at most 1,000 results, so when a search would find more than that, we split it by date. GitHub’s commit search reads default branches only, so a commit on any other branch is not counted. Private repositories are not counted, and that includes the main Zeus repository. Zeus’s own public repositories are counted like any other. One is its Homebrew tap, the repository that Homebrew installs Zeus from, which gets a pull request at every release.

Last counted: not yet.

The counts are evidence of where the line appears, and publishing them also helps people find Zeus. They do not prove that the line brings new users: we found no measurement of that.