alt Hacker NewsI'm not arguing for either side, but here's a fun thought experiment I've been thinking about a lot lately. If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets? What if I trained a team of agents to think and code like me at work, then exported those agentic skills and took them with me to another company? At what point would they still be considered the old company's property? Let's say I didn't take any code or proprietary information from the old company, just the coding style and best practices my agents learned from the old company's live metrics. Is that considered stealing from the company? Is that any different from me learning those patterns and skills personally and then reapplying them elsewhere?
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Your training of a team of agents is a product you developed while working for that company and would be owned by them. You could in theory train a new team of agents after leaving the company, but it could not be trained on anything that isn't in your brain. If you gave it anything, like the old company's live metrics, then you'd be stealing trade secrets. The key difference from you personally learning those skills is that an agent trained on company data turns personal knowledge into a portable, structured artifact, which crosses from "your skill" into something that looks a lot more like company property.
I don't understand the point of your question. The "problem" of an ex-employee consciously or subconsciously bringing his learned experiences at your company to a competitor is literally the reason why non-competes exist. In fact, this topic is quite old.
> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets?
The fact that California allows this to happen (banning non-competes and rejecting "inevitable disclosure") is exactly why Silicon Valley started here and remains here. It's exactly why ex-OpenAI people could start Anthropic. It's why neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have a monopoly on AI today. It's great both for employees and for the general public.
> At what point would they still be considered the old company's property?
It depends on your contracts (aka NDAs). Sometimes employers do ban for that very same reason from joining a competitor(s) for x years from date of separation
The difference is you’re a human with the right to self.
> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets?
Human brains are in many ways privileged agents in a legal and copyright system, because it exists to serve the needs of humans.
Artifacts produced by human brains are not.
You’ve just described how consulting works
There doesn't have to be any meaningful analogy here. Laws don't have to treat humans and machines equally. Laws are for people and allow things that are less than ideal, but necessary for people to function.
Humans can't leave their old brains at their previous employer, can't delete their experience learned on proprietary data. It wouldn't make sense for the law to fight this.
But the law can control what can be done with information stored outside of your brain.