You Can Copy What You Can See

LLMs can code so they can copy anything instantly. It sounds obvious and it is mostly wrong.

You can only copy what is on the surface, because the surface is the only part that is visible. Take Google. You can clone the front page in a few minutes. But the front page was never the product. The value sits behind it, in layers of systems you cannot see and therefore cannot copy. The interface is the smallest part of the thing.

Everything below the surface is invisible, and that is where the real work lives, such as the edge cases, decisions that look strange until you know the story behind them, lessons someone already paid for. If you have ever burned a few thousand dollars in a single night because of a programming mistake, as I have, you spend the rest of the week making sure it never happens again. An LLM cannot reproduce that. The mistake never happened to it. And often the person instructing it cannot describe the lesson either, because they have not lived it yet.

Then there is plain cost. The hypothesis is easy to test. If copying is so trivial, ask an LLM to write a browser engine. People have tried, and you blow millions for a barely working version. Try a foundational C compiler. The problem itself is enormous, the supporting code is enormous, and none of it gets written in a straight line. Some things cannot be copied for purely economic reasons.

So when someone says this or that software is dead because the surface can be cloned, it is like claiming you own a masterpiece because you photographed it at the gallery. You have something but you are missing the essence.

Even when copying is genuinely possible and affordable, writing the software is only the first leg of a long journey. It is also happens to be the exciting leg. What comes after is the drudgery of maintenance. Coding assistants help, and it still hurts, because you do not want to break what works and you do want to extend it when the need arrives. Software you compiled today might not run in a few years. Software nobody maintains turns into a liability.

CTOs who let this thinking take hold in their organisation should be asked whether they fully understand what they are there for. There is no free lunch. You pay for it one way or another. A coding assistant that can churn out code is not a reason to.