The Claude Code Leak

What the accidental Claude Code source code leak tells us about the real value of code, product market fit, and why integration is what actually makes software great.

> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust.

Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?

I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.

Heh, the original being entirely vibed had me thinking of an interesting problem: if you used the same model to generate a specification, then reset the state and passed that specification back to it for implementation, the resulting code would by design be very close to the original. With enough luck (or engineering), you could even get the same exact files in some cases.

Does this still count as clean-room? Or what if the model wasn't the same exact one, but one trained the same way on the same input material, which Anthropic never owned?

This is going to be a decade of very interesting, and probably often hypocritical lawsuits.