Link to post: https://mastodon.social/@nicklockwood/117069670583842298
Short version: Two seperate “vibe-coders” used Claude to create an app–which turned out identical. And then the coders went after each other.
Transcript
Nick Lockwood: Holy shit, so the “Claude plagiarised an app” story is actually “Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers” 😅
Colin Cornaby
infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117066183348062085
I looked at the replies to this post, did some more digging, and found the actual story is even weirder.
BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who. Kind of embarrassing.
My theory is that a number of “devs” spent thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of tokens to walk Claude into building small segments of code. Then when these two vibe coders input very similar prompts, Claude used some of the previously generated code to serve up the same solution to both. Efficient, unless you want to profit from the slop code.
As time goes on, all Claude is going to do is throw previously generated code, others paid Anthropic for to “develop”, into its own blender, and serve it up as as some weird Frankenstein’s monster software.
If you are a developer, it might be time to start patenting ideas because copyright is fucked.
No, the other app was published on GitHub just a few weeks before, it can’t be inside the training data.
It’s more likely this: Claude code can and will do web searches to integrate the prompt if too generic or dubious, found the competing GitHub repo with the same name, got the claude.md with all the description, features and inner details, and rebuilt the copy on that.
Do we really want patents on open source projects that help track the quality of a night sky for photography?
Is there really an issue if such an application just is slopped out there?