alt Hacker News> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far...
Vibe coding does not solve this problem. If anything, it makes it worse, since you no longer have any idea if an implementation might read on someone else's patent, since you did not write it.
If your agent could go read all of the patents and then avoid them in its implementations and/or tell you where you might be infringing them (without hallucinating), that would be valuable. It still would not solve the inherent problems of vagueness in the boundaries of the property rights that patents confer (which may require expensive litigation to clarify definitively) or people playing games with continuations to rewrite claim language and explicitly move those boundaries years later, among other dubious but routine practices, but it would be something.
Replies
You can infringe a patent even when you haven't seen it.
> If your agent could go read all of the patents and then avoid them in its implementations and/or tell you where you might be infringing them (without hallucinating), that would be valuable.
That would lead the whole society to a halt, because it feels impossible to do anything now without violating someone's patent. Patents quite often put small players at a disadvantage, because the whole process of issuing patents is slow, expensive and unpredictable. Also, I once heard a lawyer say that, in high-stake lawsuits the it is the pile (of patents) that matters.