I went down a rabbit hole of copyright and one of the things that clicked along the way is that a vibe coded app is not copyrightable. If someone says their app is completely Built with AI, they’re also saying: here is a public domain program that you can repackage as you wish.

It’s not quite that simple - there may be minor things here and there that are copyrightable like the name. But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.

It will be interesting to see this tested, but companies telling people AI is writing their software may be a liability in the not-to distant future.

(This is based on USCO opinions and congressional testimony: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ . EULAs are different things, and may restrict rights otherwise granted by the law, etc., etc.)

> But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.

This isn't true.

While the "copyrightability" report[1] mostly deals with images (it was written before coding agents) it's quite clear how code generated by an AI driven by humans can be copyrightable:

> The Office finds that the compilation of these images and text throughout the Work contains sufficient creativity under Feist to be protected by copyright. Specifically, the Office finds the Work is the product of creative choices with respect to the selection of the images that make up the Work and the placement and arrangement of the images and text on each of the Work’s pages.

and

> Unlike prompts alone, these tools can enable the user to control the selection and placement of individual creative elements. Whether such modifications rise to the minimum standard of originality required under Feist will depend on a case-by-case determination. In those cases where they do, the output should be copyrightable

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

It depends how that selection is done. If an AI prompts a human with 10 layouts it generates and the human picks ones, it is not copyrightable.

If the human takes some number of individually generated components and composes them in some creative way, the composition is copyrightable but the individual components are not.

One existing precedent was the layout of a graphic novel consisting AI generated panels. The layout was done by a human and protected by copyright. The content of each individual panel was generated by AI and was not. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf

Code is no different. If AI generates a library and GUI, neither are copyrightable. If a dev glues them together, the expressiveness of that work may be, but it also might be the logical application of attaching interfaces and not creative enough to meet the threshold.

The 2024 opinion reinforces that determination.

a professional software developer can simultaneously become completely dependent on a remote account each hour of each day, and lose the ability to copyright the work that the professional software developer makes, or attach a LICENSE.

So, what's not to like?

Welcome to PCB design only imagine spending an order of magnitude more on tooling.

This is actually my fear for SWEs, there is SO MUCH PRECEDENT for making the entire career path completely dependent on a single company selling a subscription at absolutely deranged prices.

Dan Luu's recent blog post [0] reminded me of Gas Town. Gas Town was all the hype when it debuted. Us, mere mortals, had a few days left in the business of software. Now, only the crickets remain in the Gas Town. Not even its creator is there [1].

[0] We should be more ambitious with the software we build. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225695

[1] https://x.com/danluu/status/2099800154639581353

Gas Town was never "the hype", it was always a bit of a joke, in fact the original post was hard to separate from satire. Linking to the HN comments here would show that.

I don’t know, I feel like he is using a lot more convincing arguments than just being dismissive without real substance like you are. When you say huge externalities are you referring to something that hasn’t been seen in other major industrial paradigm shifts?

Whats the arguments?? They're making sensationalist claims based of headlines and twitter discourse. This is all zeitgeist nonsense, anyone using AI on the day to day for hard problems knows its capabilities are far less than what you'll see claimed on this site, x the everything app, and LinkedIn.

There's genuinely just a ton of people who work on 40th percential problems and are super impressed. There's people who work on 90th percentile problems who are impressed too, but if you put those 40th percentile problem solvers on the 90th percentile problems they would not have the same outcomes. The agents by themselves are not as impressive as they're made out to be.

its like owning a personal computer in 1986. the tv talking how its going to revolutionize everything and yet their too expensive for most people to own or and 40% problem people were getting bogged down with just owning a pc, writing dear john letters to their VCRs for ever calling them difficult to use.

And all the opinions were conflicting, and all the opinions were correct.

I’m tired of the “omg huge externalities!” argument.

The externalities can literally be solved with just more AI. Especially even better AI as it emerges every year. Problems that primitive agents created back in 2024 have now long been solved by the advanced agents of 2026. And in 2028, agents will solve problems the 2026 agents leave behind.

There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!” Most software doesn’t really even live that long before it has to be changed due to new requirements.

Every problem will be solved by AI and if not then everything just gets trivially rewritten.

Mind you, we have not even entered the insane era yet where local LLMs etched in silicon chips will be putting out code at an insane 16k/tokens per second for just the cost of electricity. Let that sink in.

It’s over for handwritten code (in professional contexts).

> There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!”

This is a shortcoming of this way of thinking, IMHO. It's incredibly unlikely that we will never, ever face a massive problem caused by AI.

The problem won’t be because of AI code, it will be because the people controlling the AI have made incorrect fundamental decisions, which would lead to the same problem even if humans were the ones coding.