Comment by agilek
4 hours ago
Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs? I think the line is pretty clear here. I remember the old Dan Mall's article on this topic which is much more inspirational (and "correct"): https://medium.com/@danielmall/stealing-your-way-to-original...
> Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs?
Yes and the reason is not subtle...
We'll see much more of that now: people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.
It's crystal clear why: LLMs are very good at copying / stealing / tweaking.
What's not clear though is how are licenses, including the open-source ones, respected here?
I'm not just talking about copying a website pixel-for-pixel: I'm talking about things like re-implementing a compiler, supposedly from scratch, when we all know it's not at all a clean room implementation.
Expect a wave of "theft is good" from the same people who are pushing 24/7 "buy commercial AI models subscriptions" content (which I have btw so no need to sell me more of them).
> We bet that vibecoding would allow us to move faster
"Theft is good"
> people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.
History rhymes, indeed. Almost two centuries ago, Balzac wrote:
> A man spends ten years of his life searching for an industrial secret, a machine, some kind of discovery, he takes out a patent, he believes he is master of his thing, he is followed by a competitor who, if he has not foreseen everything, perfects his invention with a screw, and thus takes it out of his hands. [Illusions perdues, 1843]
A breakneck race toward absolute decline.
Do you not believe that the design of the "stolen" landing page was not itself 97% stolen from marketing landing pages that came before it?
It's unusual seeing the process stated so bluntly, but for something as cookie-cutter as a company homepage this has been how web designers have done things for decades. Or, at the very least, it's how the craft is learned.
I don't think it was.
I think the Mintlify designers viewed dozens if not hundreds of examples, then thought very carefully about exactly what they needed to express for their page and how best to express it. Then they built their page step by step, sweating over every detail.
Then Kibu came along, lifted the entire thing, changed "3%" of it and called it their own.
What Kibu did is gross.
Agreed. As someone who has built landing pages like that professionally you take inspiration from a wide range of sources.
Directly copying is tacky and immoral - it's also not effective. You should be thinking about how to position _your product_ not how someone else positioned their product.