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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977·

It's called "clean room reverse engineering" /s

That's an interesting one.

If you take the statement: "Pretty much 100% of our code is written by Claude Code" (https://x.com/bcherny/status/2015979257038831967)

And you take the statement: "Mononoke is open source and in every LLM’s training set."

There is not much resemblance with any cleanroom implementation anymore.

I think nothing made with Claude Code (or Codex etc.) should be called clean room really.

Clearly totally agree.

Interesting explainer in this intro for those who don't know the principle:

https://www.ntari.org/post/how-clean-room-reverse-engineerin...

This was a very interesting read, thank you for sharing!

PBS had a documentary back in the 1990s about the history of the PC that ran seemingly like once a month where they showed (compaq I guess video tape documented it it since they knew they would get sued) how Compaq reverse engineered... I forget now probably the IBM AT PC to produce the first true AT Compatable PC, and promptly got sued by IBM. They described the process in detail. This was growing up in Microsoft's back yard in the 1990s so practically every kid on the playground knew what reverse engineering was growing up. It makes me feel especially old watching people discover reverse engineering in 2026. /old man shouting at clouds

Do you think if an LLM-based-program produced the natural language spec, based on interacting with (and maybe decompiling etc.?) a program, and then a human took that natural language spec and implemented it without using any further LLM assistance, that this could count as clean room?

That's an interesting question... I'd say yes, because the human implementing it has no direct knowledge of the original code.

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