> there's no proprietary IP in your company's app

For most app that concept is "gone".

People routinely decompile and recompose existing binaries, and if you use "obfuscation" in your app it's still a small bump.

In today's age, IP is no longer a tangible concept that gives any advantages in software. What differentiates two businesses isn't their IP, it's their relationships and their moat.

Most vendors that had protected proprietary IP are now irrelevant within their vertical. What saves them are the protection provided by patents, which is public.

Can you back these claims, please?

As other have mentioned, the code isn't the valuable part. But also there are alternatives now to these LLM providers.

Are you saying you don’t trust ZDR claims from inference providers?

They don’t care about your code. There’s more and better data on the public web.

Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.

Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?

That’s the case with a personal subscription directly with OpenAI or Anthropic, but enterprise customers are opt-in, AFAIK.

And there are solutions around it from other providers and model routers. OpenRouter lets you explicitly say on a per-request basis you don’t want to be routed to a provider that trains on your input, for example.

The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase.

If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc.

[0]: For example when I worked at Google, the proprietary google3 codebase cannot exist on laptops because there are no tools to download it to your laptop.

[1]: For example Claude code supports having a gateway: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway-connect

I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that.

Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch of AI features suddenly became available. Free, no sub needed. A dev starts using them (because, why not?) and lo and behold the company's code got shipped out in an inference call and is now scheduled to be in the next training run. Oops.

How's that any different from, say, Windows updating and backing up the company's code to OneDrive?

Actions speak louder than words. If the company doesn't even supply and require work devices, they don't effectively consider their code to be valuable IP.

Is Microsoft mining their customers' backup files looking for source code to ingest into their model training pipeline?

Of course the company can still consider their code to be valuable IP.

You are merely describing companies that aspire to consider their code valuable IP, not companies that actually do so.

IDE updated? It’s the company IT’s job to perform testing before distributing those updates. And also their job to use whatever managed settings to disable those unmanaged AI features.

Yeah man I think we just have experience in two different worlds.

A single digit headcount startup with a "company IT" team testing program updates before distributing them??? Um, no. You just download VS Code (or whatever IDE you want) on the Macbook they give you and it updates when Microsoft pushes a public update.

Every company that is not Google lets you have code on your laptop. This is only an annoying thing that they came up with.

Mine doesn’t. They don’t even issue work laptops; work is done on desktops only.

You should educate yourself about AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry.

The value of most companies/apps are in the relationship with the customers, so it's the database, not the code.

Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.

It is both tbh. Anyone can build a poor clone of an application. However there are many things that you don't realise is happening beneath the scene.

It is all the small things e.g.

YouTube Mobile website works really well when you have a inconsistent connection compared to the alternatives such as Odysee, Rumble, Kick and Twitch.

I can listen to a live stream or a video style podcast in the car and YouTube will resume the connection properly as long as the browser tab on my phone hasn't gone to sleep. Kick will just stop, if it is a replay it will resume from the start of the stream after rewinding the stream a few seconds while attempting playback.

While the code to do this isn't that difficult. YouTube has bothered to deal with the edge case of someone like me driving through an area with inconsistent connection while running their mobile site (not even their app).

Whenever people try to use alternatives, they often complain about poor reliability of the app. A lot of the clones are losing users and I doubt they really even know they are doing it.

Is all this praise of YouTube on android or ios?

I've had it work well on both (iOS and Graphene OS) using Brave browser on both. It is simply much better when you are on a unstable connection than any of the other sites.

Frankly there’s more likely to be proprietary IP in the server side code than in mobile apps.

True, but shops are exposing everything to Claude or Open AI. It's akin to outsourcing all manufacturing to subcontractors in China. That was cheaper, but extremely short-sighted. Now so many products have cheap Chinese knock-offs that are nearly the same as the originals because the subcontractors made both.