but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP.

I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent.

When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.

The immediate retort to that is that the LLM is looking at code that wasn't its to read. But I don't think that's a valid objection. Pretty much by definition, everything I've learned from has a copyright on it, and other than my own code on my own time, that copyright is owned by someone else. Much of the code that's built up my understanding has been protected by NDA, or even defense-department classifications: it wasn't mine in any way. But it still informs how I do all my future coding.

By analogy: I'm also an artist, especially since my retirement. My approach to photography was influenced by Ansel Adams, and countless other artists whose works I've seen displayed in museums, or in publications and online. My current approach to painting was inspired by Bob Ross and others, and the teachers who have helped me develop. I've taken pieces of what I've seen in all their work, and all of that comes out in my photos and paintings, to varying degrees.

I've taken ideas from others in code and in art, and produced something (hopefully!) different by combining those bits with my own perspective. I don't think anyone has a claim on my product because of this relationship.

Likewise, I know that many of my successors have learned from my code (heck, I led teams, wrote one book about software development!). And I hope that someday my artwork has developed to the point where there's something in it that's worth someone else's attention to assimilate. I've never for a minute - even decades before the advent of LLMs - hoped or even imagined that my work would remain locked up with me, and that the ideas would follow me to the grave.

As they say, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. None of us would be able to achieve the tiniest fraction of what we have, without assimilating what has come before us. Through many layers of inheritance it's constantly being incorporated in subsequent works.

In a few decades at best, I'll be dead. It probably won't be very long after that when people even forget my name. But the idea that something I've done - my work in developing software systems, or in my photography and painting - will continue to have ripples through time, inspires me and gives me hope that I'll have some tiny shred of immortality beyond my personal demise.

Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?