de-claude

Remove Claude co-authorship attribution from git commits and scan your repo for Claude mentions.

Installation

npm install -g de-claude

Usage

Run in any git repository:

de-claude

This will:

1. Find all unpushed commits with Claude attribution
2. Show a preview of commits to be cleaned
3. Ask for confirmation
4. Remove the attribution lines and rewrite history

Commands

de-claude has three modes:

| Command | Description | |---------|-------------| | de-claude (or de-claude clean) | Strip Claude attribution from commit messages (default) | | de-claude scan-files | Scan tracked files in the repo for Claude mentions | | de-claude scan | Interactively review and rewrite commit messages |

Options (clean)

--dry-run          Show what would happen without making changes
-y, --yes          Skip confirmation prompt
--verbose          Show actual lines being removed
--last <n>         Process only the last N commits (first-parent only)
--all              Process all commits on the current branch
--range <range>    Explicit git commit range (e.g., HEAD~5..HEAD)
--remote           Rewrite already-pushed commits (requires --last, --all, or --range; force-pushes)
--broad            Also match commits that mention Claude anywhere in the message
-h, --help         Display help
-V, --version      Display version

--last, --all, and --range are mutually exclusive.

Selecting which commits to process

By default, de-claude auto-detects unpushed commits by comparing against your tracking branch. You can override this:

Last N commits (recommended for most cases):

de-claude --last 3

--last follows only the first-parent line, so merge commits count as one commit. --last 5 always processes exactly 5 commits regardless of merge history.

All commits on the branch:

de-claude --all

Explicit git range (for advanced usage):

de-claude --range HEAD~10..HEAD
de-claude --range origin/main..HEAD

Note: --range does not use --first-parent, so ranges that include merge commits may process more commits than expected.

Cleaning already-pushed commits

To rewrite commits that have already been pushed to the remote, add --remote. This will force-push after rewriting:

de-claude --remote --last 10
de-claude --remote --all
de-claude --remote --range abc1234..HEAD

--remote requires confirmation before force-pushing. Pass --yes to skip all prompts (useful for scripts and CI).

Scanning files for Claude mentions

Scan all tracked files in your repo for Claude-related content:

de-claude scan-files

By default, this looks for attribution patterns (Co-Authored-By, "Generated with Claude"). To also find broader mentions of "claude" (variable names, comments, docs), use --broad:

de-claude scan-files --broad

Results are grouped by file with line numbers and match types.

Interactive commit review

Review commit messages one by one and choose how to handle each:

de-claude scan --last 10
de-claude scan --all
de-claude scan --range origin/main..HEAD

For each commit with Claude attribution, you can:

• Strip — auto-remove Claude lines (same as default clean behavior)
• Edit — open your $EDITOR to write a custom replacement message
• Skip — leave the commit unchanged

This uses the same remote/local rewriting strategy as clean:

# Review and rewrite locally (you push manually afterward)
de-claude scan --last 10

# Review, rewrite, and force-push in one step
de-claude scan --remote --last 10

Options: --last <n>, --all, --range <range>, --remote, --broad, --verbose, --dry-run, -y/--yes.

Use --yes to auto-strip all found attributions without per-commit prompts (useful for scripts):

de-claude scan --yes --remote --all

Use --broad to also match commits that mention "Claude" anywhere in the message (not just attribution lines).

Other examples

Preview changes without applying them:

de-claude --dry-run

See exactly which lines will be removed:

de-claude --dry-run --verbose

Skip confirmation (useful for scripts):

de-claude --yes

What it detects

• Co-Authored-By lines containing "Claude" or "@anthropic.com"
• Generated with [Claude Code] lines
• With --broad: any line mentioning "Claude" (e.g., "CLAUDE.md", "Claude Code agents", variable names)

Before

feat: Add user authentication

Implemented JWT-based auth flow with refresh tokens.

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-Authored-By: Claude <[email protected]>

After

feat: Add user authentication

Implemented JWT-based auth flow with refresh tokens.

How it works

The tool uses git filter-branch to rewrite commit messages. It only rewrites commits starting from the oldest affected commit, minimizing unnecessary history changes.

When using interactive mode (scan), custom replacement messages are matched by original message content during the filter-branch pass — this allows per-commit customization while still using a single efficient rewrite operation.

Auto-detection (no flags)

When run without --last, --all, or --range, de-claude automatically determines which commits to scan:

1. Tracking branch exists (e.g., origin/main): scans only unpushed commits
2. Feature branch: scans commits since branching from main/master
3. No remote: scans all commits on the current branch

History rewriting

Changing a commit message changes its SHA. Every descendant commit also gets a new SHA because its parent changed. This is inherent to git — de-claude minimizes the blast radius by starting the rewrite from the oldest affected commit, not the full scan range.

Submodules

Repositories with git submodules work out of the box. Submodules are automatically ignored — their commit history is independent and managed in their own repos. de-claude only operates on the parent repository's commits.

Requirements

• Node.js 18+
• Git

License

MIT