alt Hacker NewsYou mean this one? https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/
I think that's a good illustration of my critical stance. It ends with several open questions:
Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way?
Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem?
Can I even assert copyright over this, given how much of the work was produced by the LLM?
Is it responsible to publish software libraries built in this way?
Which I later answered in another post: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/11/answers/
Replies
I’ll give you credit in my book for raising the questions. I find the answers lacking in an honest engagement with the questions however, which is worse than not answering them in some ways. It is not plausible that the answer to whether or not a certain controversial method is ethical boils down to an anecdote expressed in four sentences. What if the result of the port causes everyone involved in the original to give up? What if this capability causes people to harm themselves because they now have no economic value? What if doing the thing was meaningful at one point and now it is not? These are sub-questions I have when reading this question. There are many others.
The question you were most interested in engaging with was Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem, which has some overlap with the previous one in all fairness. Your answer to this is framed around the productive output of the open source community, not around the well-being of those involved. This misrepresents the question as stated. You also begin by suggesting all detractors are of lesser status and so their opinions can be ignored.
No. I don’t see it.
And just in case we are talking about different things here...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/criticis... presents two different definitions (among several) of "criticism":
"the act of saying that something or someone is bad or a comment that says what is bad about it"
And
"writing or speech that expresses opinions or judgments about the good or bad qualities of something or someone"
I'm talking about the second here, not the first.