Comment by bko
1 day ago
You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
The place where it concretely matters is M&A due diligence. Acquirers are now routinely asking about AI tool usage in development and running license scans as a condition of closing. A codebase that cannot demonstrate human authorship over its core IP, or that contains GPL contamination, creates a representation and warranty problem in the purchase agreement. For most companies day to day you are right. For the companies that get acquired or raise institutional capital, the question becomes very concrete very quickly.
Very interesting, I had no idea. That's probably going to be a very painful lesson learned by all the startups that have been pumping out AI code. I know of several just among my peer groups that will be shocked and dismayed by this. Thanks for sharing that!
That is exactly the gap the piece is aimed at. The M&A conversation is where this becomes concrete very fast, and most founders shipping AI-assisted code have not had it yet.
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