That's true, but there is no legal backing behind a laywer-initiated nastygram, so why fold before it even gets to that point?

It's true, the US legal system can be hopelessly expensive, but it is still possible to push back before it gets to that point if you're sure you're in the right.

especially a "new grad with no company, no funding, and no commercial ambitions"

.. doing an open source project that does what a bunch of other sites are doing to some extent. It looks like he was about a week into it. Choose your battles. I'm guessing this really isn't a big ambition for this guy, but he probably wanted to flesh-out the concept for his own satisfaction having not gotten that far during his internship. That motivation is not new to me, but I think standing down and moving on to some other interest was probably a good idea. Now he's blogging about it instead.

Dude, move on already.

I actually really appreciate that he wrote this post:

1. What if I'm considering working for Replit? This behaviour would give me second thoughts. 2. Imagine I'm a VC firm deciding whether or not to invest in them. I don't want me money being used to pursue a frivolous lawsuit against a website that isn't a commercial threat and probably isn't using their IP anyway.

Eh, personally I appreciate the blog. It's good to know who to avoid in the industry, and the accusation about trade secrets seems way overblown and egotistical. It's not that hard to figure out how to run a container when you push a button, or else said sites wouldn't be so common.