Comment by pbecotte

The emails from the company make it clear that at least one party to the dispute believed that they did use Replit's internal design decisions. Commercial companies approaching the same problem certainly would offer similar feature sets. But an employee reading the source code and then starting a git repo that makes a working version of the product freely available is a pretty big deal. It doesn't have to be copy-pasted to be valuable intellectual property. (though, I do agree that THIS was unlikely to actually be valuable IP haha)