[colinhb]

Quoting the article:

> One trick I use constantly: for well-contained features where I’ve seen a good implementation in an open source repo, I’ll share that code as a reference alongside the plan request. If I want to add sortable IDs, I paste the ID generation code from a project that does it well and say “this is how they do sortable IDs, write a plan.md explaining how we can adopt a similar approach.” Claude works dramatically better when it has a concrete reference implementation to work from rather than designing from scratch.

Licensing apparently means nothing.

Ripped off in the training data, ripped off in the prompt.

[larard]

That is the exact passage I found so shocking - if one finds the code in an open source repo, is it really acceptable to pass it through Claude code as some sort of license filter and make it proprietary?

On the other hand, next time OSX/windows/etc is leaked, one could feed it through this very same license filter. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

[miohtama]

Concepts are not copyrightable.

[colinhb]

The article isn’t describing someone who learned the concept of sortable IDs and then wrote their own implementation.

It describes copying and pasting actual code from one project into a prompt so a language model can reproduce it in another project.

It’s a mechanical transformation of someone else’s copyrighted expression (their code) laundered through a statistical model instead of a human copyist.

[layer8]

“Mechanical” is doing some heavy lifting here. If a human does the same, reimplement the code in their own style for their particular context, it doesn’t violate copyright. Having the LLM see the original code doesn’t automatically make its output a plagiarism.