By now, most people are at least familiar with ChatGPT and Claude, and have tried them out with questions, chats, and basic tasks. Software developers who use these models for agent coding report that they have become more like project managers than coders. And now, instead of coding their own personal apps, they rely on AI to do it for them. In fact, that’s what usually happens when I ask my friends what they’re coding vibes for: either for some hyper-specific personal utility or to replicate paid services.
That was the goal of apps like PhotoCraft (a “reverse-engineered” version of Photoshop) and WordCraft (the same thing, but for Microsoft Word), which developer Brandon Thomas reportedly described as “clean room replacements” for both apps. Normally, reverse engineering would be the domain of an intellectual property attorney, not a vibe coder like you or me. But as AI has made vibration coding accessible to average users, it’s worth knowing what legal risks you face by doing it.
GitHub / Story told
Are there risks? In the real world, not really… unless you want to start sharing or selling your replicated creations.
“As with most things, the risk of legal problems is low for people experimenting privately or building tools for their own uses, but it increases quickly if you distribute or sell the things you make that way,” Mitch Stoltz, director of intellectual property competition and litigation at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said by email.
Clark Asay, professor of law at Brigham Young University and author of Independent creation in an AI world, I also doubt you will have any problems. “I don’t think there is any real threat at that time,” he wrote in an email. “Technically, you could still be violating someone’s patent if you vibrate code a utility application that reads someone’s patent. But no one will discover your use in this situation or, if they do, they will sue you.”
Lazy LLMs Could Be Your Legal Problem
It’s easy enough to vibrate code an app that can run on your PC: just open a new chat within an LLM (coders prefer Anthropic’s Claude, but I’ve used OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and ask him to type it. The process is easier if the function of the application is simple. An application that creates a random butterfly to fly around your Windows desktop will be easier to describe and code than your own voice transcription application. The result usually includes both the application and a separate file containing the source code.
