See e.g. https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/ , a single human with the help of LLMs reverse engineered a non-trivial game and rewrote it in another language + graphics lib in 2 weeks.
[0] https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...
[1] https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...
Did you find it worked reasonably well on any portion of the codebase you could throw at it? For example, if I recall correctly, all of MajorMUD's data file interactions used the embedded Btrieve library which was popular at the time. For that type of specialized low-level library, I'm curious how much effort it would take to get readable code.
I actually sidestepped the annoying btrieve problem by exporting the data using a go binary [0] and I write it to a sqlite instance with raw byte arrays (blobs). btreive is weird because it has a dll but also a a service to interact with the files.
P.s. I have spent a lot of hours on this mainly to learn actual LLM capabilities that have improved a huge amount in the last year.
LLM ripping off open source code removes that.
I think refusing to publish open source code right now is the safe bet. I know I won't be publishing anything new until this gets definitively resolved, and will only limit myself to contributing to a handful of existing open source projects.
In a way we physical things were before. Are software patents the solution? Patents are one of the reasons why open hardware is not a bigger thing. I feel that this part of AI will move thing backwards.
Another alternative would turning around the evidence requirement and ask everyone for full provenance on inputs: no clue how this could ever work. This one only became evident because the 'author' voluntarily provided the evidence.