Comment by JKCalhoun

2 days ago

Exactly how I have found vibe-coding to be. I make things with LLMs help that I otherwise wouldn't be bothered to. I've vibe-coded perhaps a half dozen tools for my personal use and am happier for it.

Keep going.

You didn't make anything at all, though.

Also, please talk to a lawyer before slapping a Copyright on anything you didn't make. Machine-made products cannot be Copyrighted in the US and most Berne Convention countries, and you cannot own the output of an LLM, nor can you legally shield yourself from the consequences.

  • He made something more important and influential than most of us ever will, so it’s interesting to hear his thoughts on these things.

    Where did you get the idea that anyone was talking about trying to copyright vibe-coded tools for personal use?

  • I guess I don't get caught up in the distinction of whether I created the software or not. But for Claude/Gemini and me, it would not have existed—and did not exist beforehand.

    At the end of the day, I have tools that are helping with screen-printing (and stereo photography, and other hobbies). I don't care if Brownies gathered around my computer when I was sleeping and wrote the software (to my specification).

    I suppose that puts me in that group of programmers that are focused on the end-product, agnostic as to how the thing was made. I have truly never enjoyed the plumbing part of the job—just want clean tap water.

    (Well, the algorithms have always fascinated with a mathematical appreciation: matrix transforms, Bloom filters, etc. Aspects like robustly handling multi-threading has always been a kind of painful Sudoku puzzle I try to do in my head—while a challenge, I sometimes would rather not hurt my brain that way. The tedium of stubbing in functions, filling them in to make a boiler-plate image cache–never very interesting.)

    I don't copyright anything I do. I had some software published 36 years ago and the publisher slapped a copyright on it, but I have never done so.

    • > I suppose that puts me in that group of programmers that are focused on the end-product, agnostic as to how the thing was made. I have truly never enjoyed the plumbing part of the job—just want clean tap water.

      FWIW I think most people don't belong to either group exclusively. I often care mostly about the outcome (e.g. at work or when i make small tools for myself), but occasionally i care mostly about the process (e.g. when learning a new programming language or solving problems akin to advent of code)

      1 reply →

  • I think "tools for personal use" implies both that their utility is more important than craftsmanship, and that they aren't public.