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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

If you can vibecode a product that sells, I can vibecode a free open source one just as easily, probably even easier since I can just ask the AI to copy the existing one. Software is trending towards being free and open source.

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Yeah, and then who maintains it?

Maintaining vibe coded software is going to become hours spent with Claude not your users.

That's going to be the difference. It takes nothing to rebuild the software, but listening to users, iterating, handling issues. That's boring.

The ones that win will be the ones that stay the course, not the ones that were built the quickest.

I mean, you can also use agents to listen to users and handle issues automatically.

But I guess you mean the discovery part? Yea, agents are not going to totally replace that anytime soon. Though, Claude voice mode is pretty good these days, so I’m sure it’s on their mind.

Not sure what you mean by “stay the course.” I think the winners will be those with the most effective marketing strategies. Surely that will require automation.

Half of the value in open source was that it was used by lots of people and all of the nasty edge cases and bugs have been ironed out.

If LLMs were performing according to hype then yes, virtually all paid software would be gone by now and there would be a high quality FOSS equivalent of all of it.

In the good old days that was called 'piracy'.

Unclear if this is that. If someone makes their own FOSS Photoshop, that's not piracy, it's GIMP. Training a AI on things that one otherwise has lawful access to (and not, e.g., pirating the material which Meta is being sued over and Anthropic settled over) has been ruled lawful.

Is asking an LLM to "make an open-source Photoshop clone" more like GIMP, or more like opening someone else's photo in Photoshop and clicking the menu option for the filter to make it look like a stained glass window and claiming the stained glass window version is your own IP that doesn't need permission from the original creator?

We may need new IP laws. Or, to the horror of many software developers 20 years ago, software patents.

And "new IP laws" doesn't mean "stronger": the justification for giving creators a monopoly on their works (the right to copy, or copyright) is to encourage more. If we've got a machine to automate this, there's suddenly no reason to encourage more.

Decompiling binaries and building something very similar is surely an act of piracy.

That’s only really done for video games where you want an identical clone. The vibecoded photoshops aren’t decomps. They are just asking LLMs to build photoshop from scratch in rust.

You can't prove that point,because model training data is opaque.

It might be, depending on what the LLM used the binary for. Patented algorithms? Yes. File format compatibility? Quite possibly not.

But what about when they're only given the user manual and told to implement it?

And extra "fun", given that "hack HuggingFace" wasn't part of the thing being tested when OpenAI's LLM did exactly that: what happens when the LLM decides the best way to implement the user manual is to decompile the binary?

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