alt Hacker NewsClaude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
Replies
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code.
Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
What do you mean? The programmers work is literally combining the existing patterns into solutions for problems.
> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
I don’t think it’s fair to call someone who used Stack Overflow to find a similar answer with samples of code to copy to their project an asshole.
Software engineer? You think I cite all the code I’ve ever seen before when I reproduce it? That I even remember where it comes from?
>we probably would have a word for them
Student? Good learner? Pretty much what everyone does can be boiled down to reading lots of other code that’s been written and adapting it to a use case. Sure, to some extent models are regurgitating memorized information, but for many tasks they’re regurgitating a learned method of doing something and backfilling the specifics as needed— the memorization has been generalized.
This is why ragebait is chosen as the word of 2025.
> took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case
Aka software engineering.
> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
Humans do this all the time.
Are you saying that every piece of code you have ever written contains a full source list of every piece of code you previously read to learn specific languages, patterns, etc?
Or are you saying that every piece of code you ever wrote was 100% original and not adapted from any previous codebase you ever worked in or any book / reference you ever read?
Programmers are willingly blind to this, at least until it's their code being stolen or they lose their job.
_LLMs are lossily compressed archives of stolen code_.
Trying to achieve AI through compression is nothing new.[0] The key innovation[1] is that the model[2] does not output only the first order input data but also the higher order patterns from the input data.
That is certainly one component of intelligence but we need to recognize that the tech companies didn't build AI, they build a compression algorithm which, combined with the stolen input text, can reproduce the input data and its patterns in an intelligent-looking way.
[0]: http://prize.hutter1.net/
[1]: Oh, god, this phrase is already triggering my generated-by-LLM senses.
[2]: Model of what? Of the stolen text. If 99.9999% of the work to achieve AI wasn't done by people whose work was stolen, they wouldn't be called models.
This is not how LLMs work.
You mean like copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow?
> Someone else did
Who?
I've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail.
Not to mention the moral vagaries of "if you use a library, is the complete articulation of your thing actually 100% your code?"
Is there a difference between loading and using a function from ImageMagick, and a standalone copycat function that mimics a function from ImageMagick?
What if you need it transliterated from one language to another?
Is it really that different than those 1200 page books from the 90's that walk you through implementing a 3D engine from scratch (or whatever the topic might be)? If you make a game on top of that book's engine, is your game truly yours?
If you learn an algorithm in some university class and then just write it again later, is that code yours? What if your code is 1-for-1 a copy of the code you were taught?
It gets very murky very quick!
Obviously I would encourage proper citation, but I also recognize the reality of this stuff -- what if you're fully rewriting something you learned decades ago and don't know who to cite? What if you have some code snippet from a website long forgotten that you saved and used? What if you use a library that also uses a library that you're not aware of because you didn't bother to check, and you either cite the wrapper lib or cite nothing at all?
I don't have some grand theory or wise thoughts about this shit, and I enjoy the anthropological studies trying to ascertain provenance / assign moral authority to remarkable edge cases, but end of the day I also find it exhausting to litigate the use of a tool that exploited the fact that your code got hoovered up by a giant robot because it was public, and might get regurgitated elsewhere.
To me, this is the unfortunate and unfair story of Gregory Coleman [0] -- drummer for The Winstons, who recorded "Amen, Brother" in 1969 (which gave us the most-sampled drum break in the world, spawned multiple genres of music, and changed human history) -- the man never made a dime from it, never even knew, and died completely destitute, despite his monumental contribution to culture. It's hard to reconcile the unjustness of it all, yet not that hard to appreciate the countless positive things that came out of it.
I don't know. I guess at the end of the day, does the end justify the means? Feels pretty subjective!
[flagged]
Yes, the word for that is software developer.
Certainly if a human wrote code that solved this problem, and a second human copied and tweaked it slightly for their use case, we would have a word for them.
Would we use the same word if two different humans wrote code that solved two different problems, but one part of each problem was somewhat analogous to a different aspect of a third human's problem, and the third human took inspiration from those parts of both solutions to create code that solved a third problem?
What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
I think "plagiarism", "inspiration", and just "learning from" fall on some continuous spectrum. There are clear differences when you zoom out, but they are in degree, and it's hard to set a hard boundary. The key is just to make sure we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created.