Comment by jgalt212
1 day ago
And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?
1 day ago
And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?
> there's no proprietary IP in your company's app
For most app that concept is "gone".
People routinely decompile and recompose existing binaries, and if you use "obfuscation" in your app it's still a small bump.
In today's age, IP is no longer a tangible concept that gives any advantages in software. What differentiates two businesses isn't their IP, it's their relationships and their moat.
Most vendors that had protected proprietary IP are now irrelevant within their vertical. What saves them are the protection provided by patents, which is public.
Are you saying you don’t trust ZDR claims from inference providers?
They don’t care about your code. There’s more and better data on the public web.
Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.
Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?
That’s the case with a personal subscription directly with OpenAI or Anthropic, but enterprise customers are opt-in, AFAIK.
And there are solutions around it from other providers and model routers. OpenRouter lets you explicitly say on a per-request basis you don’t want to be routed to a provider that trains on your input, for example.
The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase.
If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc.
[0]: For example when I worked at Google, the proprietary google3 codebase cannot exist on laptops because there are no tools to download it to your laptop.
[1]: For example Claude code supports having a gateway: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway-connect
5 replies →
You should educate yourself about AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry.
The value of most companies/apps are in the relationship with the customers, so it's the database, not the code.
Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.
It is both tbh. Anyone can build a poor clone of an application. However there are many things that you don't realise is happening beneath the scene.
It is all the small things e.g.
YouTube Mobile website works really well when you have a inconsistent connection compared to the alternatives such as Odysee, Rumble, Kick and Twitch.
I can listen to a live stream or a video style podcast in the car and YouTube will resume the connection properly as long as the browser tab on my phone hasn't gone to sleep. Kick will just stop, if it is a replay it will resume from the start of the stream after rewinding the stream a few seconds while attempting playback.
While the code to do this isn't that difficult. YouTube has bothered to deal with the edge case of someone like me driving through an area with inconsistent connection while running their mobile site (not even their app).
Whenever people try to use alternatives, they often complain about poor reliability of the app. A lot of the clones are losing users and I doubt they really even know they are doing it.
As other have mentioned, the code isn't the valuable part. But also there are alternatives now to these LLM providers.
Frankly there’s more likely to be proprietary IP in the server side code than in mobile apps.
True, but shops are exposing everything to Claude or Open AI. It's akin to outsourcing all manufacturing to subcontractors in China. That was cheaper, but extremely short-sighted. Now so many products have cheap Chinese knock-offs that are nearly the same as the originals because the subcontractors made both.