I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human.
Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out.
Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.
Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write.
I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post.
The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.
It does read as if were written on a phone but it doesn’t read like LLM text to me.
What is interesting and has possibly bled over from heavy LLM use by the author is the style of simplistic bullet point titles for the argument with filler in between. It does read like they wrote the 5 bullet points then added the other text (by hand).
I personally found it really amusing how they weaponized the legal system to DMCA all the claude code source code repositories. Code ingested into the model is not copyrightable, but produced code apparently is when by legal definition computer generated code can not be copyrighted and that's one of their primary arguments in legal cases.
> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products.
The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and needs more time for that hype to die down and the true value to show up, as well as to see whether it becomes the 9th circle of hell to keep in working order.
Hey there, author of the post here. I actually agree with this! That is in fact why I used the word maybe — my comment really was meant to be more speculative than definitive.
I think one thing that goes unmentioned is that maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things, because they can be trivially reproduced if need be. I would argue Claude Code is exactly such a project; coding agents are incredibly simple and rewriting CC wouldn't be much of a problem.
Non-trivial things tend to be much more sensitive to code quality in my experience, and will by necessity be kept around for longer and thus be much more sensitive to maintenance issues.
> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust.
Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?
Heya, post author here. I think I was just wrong about this assertion. I got into a discussion with a copyright lawyer over on Bluesky[^1] after I wrote this and came away reasonably convinced that this wouldn’t be a valid example of a clean room implementation.
I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.
Heh, the original being entirely vibed had me thinking of an interesting problem: if you used the same model to generate a specification, then reset the state and passed that specification back to it for implementation, the resulting code would by design be very close to the original. With enough luck (or engineering), you could even get the same exact files in some cases.
Does this still count as clean-room? Or what if the model wasn't the same exact one, but one trained the same way on the same input material, which Anthropic never owned?
This is going to be a decade of very interesting, and probably often hypocritical lawsuits.
in a typical clean-room design, the person writing the new implementation is not supposed to have any knowledge of the original, they should only have knowledge of the specification.
if one person writes the spec from the implementation, and then also writes the new implementation, it is not clean-room design.
I believe the argument is that LLMs are stateless. So if the session writing the code isn't the same session that wrote the spec, it's effectively a clean room implementation.
There are other details of course (is the old code in the training data?) but I'm not trying to weigh in on the argument one way or the other.
Seems equally valid to come out of this with the takeaway that code quality _does_ matter, because poor coding practices are what led to the leak.
Sure, the weights are where the real value lives, but if the quality is so lax they leak their whole codebase, maybe they are just lucky they didn’t leak customer data or the model weights? If that did happen, the entire business might evaporate overnight.
1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software.
Now try maintaining it.
2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated).
No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business.
3. It’s about product market fit.
OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands?
4. Anthropic can’t defend the copyright of their leaked code.
This I agree with and they are hoist by their own petard. Would anyone want the garbage though?
5. This leak doesn’t matter
I agree with the author but for different reasons - the value is the models, which are incredibly expensive to train, not the badly written scaffold surrounding it.
We also should not mistake current market value for use value.
Unlike the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train I don’t see this as meaning code is dead, it’s an illustration of where fully relying on generative AI will take you - to a garbage unmaintainable mess which must be a nightmare to work with for humans or LLMs.
Claude Code just proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users.
Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it run bash commands.
It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.
I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" (https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/)?
I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human.
Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out.
Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.
Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write.
I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post.
The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.
It does read as if were written on a phone but it doesn’t read like LLM text to me.
What is interesting and has possibly bled over from heavy LLM use by the author is the style of simplistic bullet point titles for the argument with filler in between. It does read like they wrote the 5 bullet points then added the other text (by hand).
I personally found it really amusing how they weaponized the legal system to DMCA all the claude code source code repositories. Code ingested into the model is not copyrightable, but produced code apparently is when by legal definition computer generated code can not be copyrighted and that's one of their primary arguments in legal cases.
> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products.
The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and needs more time for that hype to die down and the true value to show up, as well as to see whether it becomes the 9th circle of hell to keep in working order.
Hey there, author of the post here. I actually agree with this! That is in fact why I used the word maybe — my comment really was meant to be more speculative than definitive.
I think one thing that goes unmentioned is that maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things, because they can be trivially reproduced if need be. I would argue Claude Code is exactly such a project; coding agents are incredibly simple and rewriting CC wouldn't be much of a problem.
Non-trivial things tend to be much more sensitive to code quality in my experience, and will by necessity be kept around for longer and thus be much more sensitive to maintenance issues.
> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust.
Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?
Heya, post author here. I think I was just wrong about this assertion. I got into a discussion with a copyright lawyer over on Bluesky[^1] after I wrote this and came away reasonably convinced that this wouldn’t be a valid example of a clean room implementation.
[^1]: https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y
The most fitting method would be to be to train an LLM on the Claude Code source-code (among other data).
Then use Anthropic's own argument that LLM output is original work and thus not subject to copyright.
I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.
Heh, the original being entirely vibed had me thinking of an interesting problem: if you used the same model to generate a specification, then reset the state and passed that specification back to it for implementation, the resulting code would by design be very close to the original. With enough luck (or engineering), you could even get the same exact files in some cases.
Does this still count as clean-room? Or what if the model wasn't the same exact one, but one trained the same way on the same input material, which Anthropic never owned?
This is going to be a decade of very interesting, and probably often hypocritical lawsuits.
right. that's not what people are doing here though, at all
in a typical clean-room design, the person writing the new implementation is not supposed to have any knowledge of the original, they should only have knowledge of the specification.
if one person writes the spec from the implementation, and then also writes the new implementation, it is not clean-room design.
I believe the argument is that LLMs are stateless. So if the session writing the code isn't the same session that wrote the spec, it's effectively a clean room implementation.
There are other details of course (is the old code in the training data?) but I'm not trying to weigh in on the argument one way or the other.
Seems equally valid to come out of this with the takeaway that code quality _does_ matter, because poor coding practices are what led to the leak.
Sure, the weights are where the real value lives, but if the quality is so lax they leak their whole codebase, maybe they are just lucky they didn’t leak customer data or the model weights? If that did happen, the entire business might evaporate overnight.
Points from the article.
1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software.
Now try maintaining it.
2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated).
No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business.
3. It’s about product market fit.
OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands?
4. Anthropic can’t defend the copyright of their leaked code.
This I agree with and they are hoist by their own petard. Would anyone want the garbage though?
5. This leak doesn’t matter
I agree with the author but for different reasons - the value is the models, which are incredibly expensive to train, not the badly written scaffold surrounding it.
We also should not mistake current market value for use value.
Unlike the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train I don’t see this as meaning code is dead, it’s an illustration of where fully relying on generative AI will take you - to a garbage unmaintainable mess which must be a nightmare to work with for humans or LLMs.
Claude Code just proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users.
Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it run bash commands.
It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.
They just said this was an April Fools joke.
jokesonthemiwasonlypretending.png
No you fell for someone elses joke.