I’ve been very fascinated by the concept of a programming language designed for LLMs, both to that advantage of their strengths and to try and minimize their weaknesses.
If you have a more recent citation referring to case law that states the opposite then that would be great but afaik this article reflects the current state of affairs.
The human using the tool creates a prompt, there is then an automatic transformation of the prompt into code. Such automatic transformation is generally accepted as not to create a new work (after all, anybody else inputting the same prompt would have a reasonable expectation of generating the same output modulo some noise due to versioning and possibly other local context).
Claud code and in general AI generated code does not at present create a new work. But the prompt, that part which you input may be sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection.
In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code).
Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always) editing the code afterwards, manually running the code and promoting for changes, etc.
Until the courts, legislators, or the copyright office define something otherwise, I’m highly confident of my assertion. (Mostly because of the insane number of hours I’ve spent with counsel on this. And, as a disclaimer, since I am biased: I worked on Copilot and Google’s various AI assisted coding products as an SVP and VP.)
If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off.
The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you make them out to be. Until there is a ruling that clearly establishes that the person that generated the prompt owns the copyright on the code I think it is misleading to suggest that this is already the case, your lawyers are not the lawyers of the parties that will end up hurt if it ends up not being so.
For contrast: we have a very clear idea on what things are copyrighted and in general these things do not rest on a foundation of IP appropriated from others outside of the license terms. The fact that the infringement is fine grained and effectively harms the rights of 1000s or more individuals doesn't change the heart of the matter, whoever wrote the code: it wasn't you.
Given your bias I'm not surprised that this would be your argument though, effectively you have created a copyright laundromat using code that you were nominally the steward of and not the owner but whether it stands long term or not is not up to your lawyers.
You warrant you wrote the code yourself, then it is found your code infringes on code owned by other entities. Now you have a tough choice: admit you lied about writing your code yourself tainting all of the code you claim you wrote since these tools became available or stand and take the infringement penalty which could be very substantial.
Judges and courts don't like playing silly games like this.
I've sued two parties for copyright infringement and won and a third settled out of court for a substantial sum. You don't tell a judge you don't need to prove you wrote the code, that's an automatic loss. Then there are such things as expert witnesses who will interview you and check how much you know about the code you claim you wrote.
>I've sued two parties for copyright infringement and won and a third settled out of court for a substantial sum. You don't tell a judge you don't need to prove you wrote the code, that's an automatic loss. Then there are such things as expert witnesses who will interview you and check how much you know about the code you claim you wrote.
This doesn't really make sense; in no way can an "expert" interview definitively assert someone wrote a piece of code or not, especially if the person has access to the code beforehand.
LLMs can definitely write programming languages. I used Gemini CLI (once it came, AI Studio before that) with Gemini 2.5 Pro to create one with Rust and LLVM:
This was completely vibe coded - I never had to edit the code, though it was very interactive. The whole thing tool less than a month of some evenings and weekends.
(Note: it’s ugly on purpose, as I’m playing with ideas around languages that LLMs would naturally be effective using.)
I’ve also experimented with using rust to create a new programming language where I vibe coded (eg never wrote myself). My opinion is that it’s quite capable with disciplined management.
Stopped reading after the patently false “communist inspired universal basic income”. A casual knowledge of the topic would lead one to understand it’s a capitalist, Milton Friedman inspired, idea.
Hi all - I'm the head of engineering at GitHub. Please accept my sincere apology for this downtime. The cause was a bad deploy (a db migration that changed an index). We were able to revert in about 30 minutes. This is slower than we'd like, and we'll be doing a full RCA of this outage.
Thanks for taking the time to personally give a status update while things are on fire. I hope you and all the others who are dealing with this emergency will have an especially restful weekend.
I was just griping on Twitter yesterday about how many developers won't immediately revert an update that causes downtime, but will actually spend time trying to solve the problem while Rome burns.
Sometimes reverting is not reasonably possible--suppose you updated a database schema and clients immediately started filling it with new data that would have no home in any backup--you'd end up in another unanticipated state.
@keithba I have build a - private - GitHub action around https://github.com/sbdchd/squawk - for Postgres - that lints all our migrations files on each PR. The action extract raw SQL from the codebase and pass them into squawk.
It catches many exclusive locks migration or missing `index concurrently` that would otherwise have been release to production and causing downtime or degraded service. Maybe something you should start doing.
GitHub uses MySQL, not Postgres. They built the best-in-class online schema change tool gh-ost [1], and have a custom declarative schema change execution system built around Skeema [2], which contains a wealth of linters [3].
Even so, it's always possible for an engineer to submit a schema change which is detrimental to performance. For example, dropping an important index, or changing it such that some necessary column is no longer present. Linters simply cannot catch some classes of these problems, as they're application/workload-specific. Usually they must be caught in code review, but people make mistakes and could approve a bad change.
Disclosure: I'm the author of Skeema, but have not worked for or with GitHub in any capacity.
Most of the services are free. You don't have to use the test service if it is outside of your budget. For instance, you could push your successful builds directly to beta testers, if you'd like.
We've gone out of our way to make sure everything in the product is accessible via our REST API, and we also have a CLI you can install from npm.
Just curious, why is the testing so expensive? I've seen other products that provide this same testing service and they are all very expensive. Is it because of the hardware required, an ROI thing, a first to market thing, or something else?
I’ve been very fascinated by the concept of a programming language designed for LLMs, both to that advantage of their strengths and to try and minimize their weaknesses.
Here’s a take I experimented with last year (feel very free to steal anything useful): https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/aether/tree/feature/v...
(Note: main has a version that was an ugly syntax, the branch in the link was for a prettier attempt)