this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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No, that IS the problem legally, but it goes slightly beyond snippets, it's also about having similar overall design.
That is also how humans work. Any code you write is going to be subconsciously influenced by code you've seen before, especially code you yourself have written in other projects that you may not legally own. Much like an LLM, the human brain is a black box in that you don't always know where an idea or something comes from.
This is why clean-room designs are often necessary. You need to replicate something a GPL project does, you should only use devs that have never seen that GPL project's code. Same for replicating proprietary projects, you don't use people that have seen that project's' code. So again, either the whole issue is stupid and we can use LLMs too, or it's a real issue and everything should be clean-roomed to avoid any chance of an accidental licensing issue.