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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

391 points · 454 comments · lladnar

  1. podgietaru · · focus · HN ↗
    The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.

    "Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."

    1. minimaxir · · focus · HN ↗
      The README (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adamtwiss&#x2F;coda#license" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adamtwiss&#x2F;coda#license) addresses concerns about copyright in good faith and better than most agentic-driven repos:

      &gt; After our initial 0.9.0 pre-release (July 2026), community feedback raised that Coda contained AGPL-licensed code. This prompted a full audit of our codebase and dependencies, and steps to correct what it found. We now believe Coda complies with all applicable licenses. If you have any concern, please open a GitHub issue with the details and we&#x27;ll happily investigate.

      1. Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
        The debate is about whether or not the new code qualifies as derived.

        They can remove all of the literal code matches from the codebase, but if it was written by having an LLM study the original code and then write something similar, it&#x27;s hard to argue it&#x27;s not a derivative work.

        1. ncphillips · · focus · HN ↗
          Genuine question: if a human did this manually would it be considered derived?
          1. phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
            Would have to be proven in court. Look up history of cases and settlements for GPL violations and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s relatively toothless and mostly license theater.
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