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pull_my_fingertoday at 7:12 PM1 replyview on HN

Ethically, selling code or programs built on other peoples code without consent is wrong.

Legally, it's probably also unlawful, unless you believe that smoke they're selling that it was trained on code that was open licensed or in the public domain.

Professionally, it's a poor choice to ship code that wasn't produced with human care and consideration or even thorough oversight or understanding based on recent trends.

Software developers like to call themselves "engineers", but more and more they're showing they're more than happy to be configurators of black boxes of modular software. Whether that means pulling random NPM packages with thousands of other random packages as dependencies (none of which are even browsed or licenses checked), or "vibe coding" slop the LLM spits out.

When the main problem was people assembling random packages, I always likened it to "sandwich artists" at Subway. They just stand behind the counter and configure the product of random combinations of ingredients (someone else's NPM packages). Now it's like they can't even see the selection of ingredients, they just grab handfuls and shove it together until they get something sandwich shaped. Bad times in software.


Replies

scotty79today at 8:58 PM

Most software of the future will have userbase of 1.

You won't be selling software. You'll be selling a service of assisting someone so they can build software for themselves.