I think this summarizes in one conversation what is so fucking irritating about this thing: I am supposed to believe that it wrote that code.
No siree, no RAG, no trickery with training a model to transform the code while maintaining identical expression graph, it just goes from word-salading all over the place on a natural language task, to outputting 100 lines of coherent code.
Although that does suggest a new dunk on computer touchers, of the AI enthusiast kind, you can point at that and say that coding clearly does not require any logical reasoning.
(Also, as usual with AI it is not always that good. sometimes it fucks up the code, too).
Pre-LLM, I had to sit through one or two annual videos to the sense of “dont cut and paste from open source, better yet don’t even look at GPLd code you arent working on” and had to do a click test with questions like “is it ok if you rename all the variables yes no”. Ohh and I had to run a scanning tool as part of the release process.
I don’t think its the FSD they would worry about, but GPL especially v3. Nobody gives a shit if it steals some leetcode snippet, or cuts and pastes some calls to a stupid API.
But if you have a “coding agent” just replicating GPL code wholesale, thousands and thousands of lines, it would be very obvious. And not all companies ship shitcode. Apple is a premium product and ages old patched CVEs from open source cropping up in there wouldn’t be exactly premium.
And, after the end of the AI boom, do we really know what wealthy investors are going to do with the money they cannot throw at startups anymore? Can we be sure they won’t be using it to fund lawsuits over alleged copyright infringements instead?
Fund copyright infringement lawsuits against the people they had been bankrolling the last few years? Sure, if the ROI is there, but I’m guessing they’ll likely move on to then next trendy sounding thing, like a quantum remote diddling stablecoin or whatevertheshit.
Either that, or put their money into defence and make a quick killing off of all the war breaking out.
And there might be new “vulture funds” that deliberately buy failing software companies simply because they hold some copyright that might be exploitable. If there are convincing legal reasons why this likely won’t fly, fine. Otherwise I wouldn’t rely on the argument that “this is a theoretical possibility, but who would ever do such a thing?”
Exploiting software copyright could be profitable, but to my knowledge its an unproven method. At this moment, they’re probably eyeing the fact that defense spending is ballooning worldwide and thinking “there’s some easy money to made”.
I too love to reminisce over the time (like 3m ago) when the c-suite would think twice before okaying uploading whatever wherever, ostensibly on the promise that it would cut delivery time (up to) some notable percentage, but mostly because everyone else is also doing it.
Code isn’t unmoated because it’s mostly shit, it’s because there’s only so many ways to pound a nail into wood, and a big part of what makes a programming language good is that it won’t let you stray too much without good reason.
You are way overselling coding agents.
Its not about moats, it’s about open source community (whose code had been trained on) coming out with pitchforks. It has nothing to do with moats.
Re-creating some open source project with a similar function is literally the only way a coding agent can pretend to be a programmer.
I tried latest models for code and they are in fact capable of shitting out a thousand lines of working code at a time, which obviously can only be obtained via plagiarism since they are also incapable of writing the most trivial code for a novel situation. And the neat thing about plagiarism is that once you start you can keep going since there’s more of compatible code where it came from.