I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM. On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don't support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn't let Claude write the code. With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:

- Read an .icc file from disk

- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)

- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs

The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).

Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.

> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.

I don’t think it’s fair to call someone who used Stack Overflow to find a similar answer with samples of code to copy to their project an asshole.

Who brought Stack Overflow up? Stack Overflow does not magically generate code, someone has to actually provide it first.

I generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit.

Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.

Stack Overflow deals with that issue by having a license agreement.

GitHub, Bitbucket, GCE, AWS…all have licensing agreements for user contributions which the user flagged as “public” so I’m not exactly clear of your point if you are holding SO up as a bastion of intellectual property rights different from the other places LLM training sets were scraped from.