I can see how it pushes the boundary, but I can’t lay out logic that it’s not. The code has been publish for the public to see. I’m always allowed to read it, remember it, tell my friends about it. Certainly, this is what the author hoped I would do. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have kept it to themselves?
These agents are just doing a more sophisticated, faster version of that same act.
I don't remember the exact case now, but someone was cloning a program (Lotus123 -> Quatro or Excel???). They printed every single screen and made a team write a full specification in English. Later another separate team look at the screenshots and text and reimplement it. Apparently meatballs can get tainted, but the plain English text loophole was safe enough.
[1] From https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ#wh...
> Who can't contribute to Wine?
> Some people cannot contribute to Wine because of potential copyright violation. This would be anyone who has seen Microsoft Windows source code (stolen, under an NDA, disassembled, or otherwise). There are some exceptions for the source code of add-on components (ATL, MFC, msvcrt); see the next question.
This is close to how I would actually recommend reimplementing a legacy system (owned by the re-implementer) with AI SWE. Not to avoid copyright, but to get the AI to build up everything it needs to maintain the system over a long period of time. The separate team is just a new AI instance whose context doesn’t contain the legacy the code (because that would pollute the new result). The amplify isn’t too apt though since there is a difference between having something in your context (which you can control and is very targeted) and the code that the model was trained on (which all AI instance will share unless you use different models, and anyways, it isn’t supposed to be targeted).
I think this is the part where we disagree. Have you used LLMs, or is this based on something you read?