When Fable first released, I had it "one shot" a project using an initial spec and a team of agents. I was blown away with how good the results were.
And then I noticed some links to images from random small github projects and realized somewhere along the way agents had searched for existing projects and copied almost everything.
I wonder if something similar happened here on a larger scale.
I think a lot is memory really. For fun you can try pointing just about any model against the older kaggle challenges and it’ll come up with more or less the winning solution from memory. It’s here where you see a Gemma 27b perform about the same as opus 5.5
It's the same for CTF challenges. Many get 'solved' because a writup was found and steps were followed.
GitHub is to agents what StackOverflow was to developers back in the day (in a meme kinda way).
More seriously, I'm curious if you checked on the licensing of said codebases, were they permissive or strong copyleft?