I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".
> I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code
You seem like you're on the cusp of stating the obvious correct conclusion: it isn't.
That's your opinion (since you said "IMO"), not the actual legal definition.
Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test suite to Claude'
This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
Yes this is the best way to ask the question. If I take a public facing API and reimplement everything, whether it's by human or machine, it should be sufficient. After all, that's what Google did, and it's not like their engineers never read a single line of the Java source code. Even in "clean room" implementations, a human might still have remembered or recalled a previous implementation of some function they had encountered before.
About this specific point, it is unclear how much of a defect memorization actually is - there are also reasons to see it as necessary for effective learning. This link explains it well:
https://infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorization-vs-gener...
No, it is completely different.
Claude was trained on chardet, anything built by Claude would fail the clean-room reimplementation test.
> But how far away from direct and explicit representations do we have to go before copyright no longer applies?
So when you clone the behavior of a program like chardet without referencing the original source code except by executing it to make sure your clone produces exactly the same output, you may still be infringing its copyright if that output reflects creative choices made in the design of chardet that aren't fully determined by the functional purpose of the program.
