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The Claude Code Leak

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Re: The Claude Code Leak

#11

Post by mergesort »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #9

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" ( https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ )? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn'…

Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write.

I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post.

The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#12

Post by mergesort »

leduyquang753 wrote: post #7

> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products. The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and ne…

Hey there, author of the post here. I actually agree with this! That is in fact why I used the word maybe — my comment really was meant to be more speculative than definitive.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#14

Post by mergesort »

anematode wrote: post #2

> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust. Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?

Heya, post author here. I think I was just wrong about this assertion. I got into a discussion with a copyright lawyer over on Bluesky[^1] after I wrote this and came away reasonably convinced that this wouldn’t be a valid example of a clean room implementation.

[^1]: https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#16

Post by grey-area »

Points from the article.

1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software.

Now try maintaining it.

2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated).

No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business.

3. It’s about product market fit.

OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands?

4. Anthropic can’t defend the copyright of their leaked code.

This I agree with and they are hoist by their own petard. Would anyone want the garbage though?

5. This leak doesn’t matter

I agree with the author but for different reasons - the value is the models, which are incredibly expensive to train, not the badly written scaffold surrounding it.

We also should not mistake current market value for use value.

Unlike the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train I don’t see this as meaning code is dead, it’s an illustration of where fully relying on generative AI will take you - to a garbage unmaintainable mess which must be a nightmare to work with for humans or LLMs.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#18

Post by m132 »

recursive wrote: post #3
anematode wrote: post #2

> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust. Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?

I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.

Heh, the original being entirely vibed had me thinking of an interesting problem: if you used the same model to generate a specification, then reset the state and passed that specification back to it for implementation, the resulting code would by design be very close to the original. With enough luck (or engineering), you could even get the same exact files in some cases.

Does this still count as clean-room? Or what if the model wasn't the same exact one, but one trained the same way on the same input material, which Anthropic never owned?

This is going to be a decade of very interesting, and probably often hypocritical lawsuits.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#19

Post by grey-area »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #9

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" ( https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ )? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn'…

It does read as if were written on a phone but it doesn’t read like LLM text to me.

What is interesting and has possibly bled over from heavy LLM use by the author is the style of simplistic bullet point titles for the argument with filler in between. It does read like they wrote the 5 bullet points then added the other text (by hand).

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#20

Post by himata4113 »

I personally found it really amusing how they weaponized the legal system to DMCA all the claude code source code repositories. Code ingested into the model is not copyrightable, but produced code apparently is when by legal definition computer generated code can not be copyrighted and that's one of their primary arguments in legal cases.
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