Last weekend I made myself a website. I had wanted to for ages—getting clients through word of mouth alone wasn’t cutting it. But only now, with Claude Code, was it easy enough.

I was glad the marketing was paying off when I received an email from a potential client. It wasn’t the sort of client I was expecting. I was hoping to catch a few more cheating husbands and delinquent teenagers.

Simpson, a young tech founder, was casually dressed in a t-shirt and jeans when he stepped into my office.

“Our competitor—they seem to be selling the same RL environments to similar clients. Let's say we build something and sell to lab X. Before we even get on a call with lab Y, we hear that they’ve already purchased the same envs from Purge. It's very suspicious. Purge has barely any employees—they call themselves a superlean startup. But they are matching our output and quality. How?”

“Maybe they are just good?”

Simpson looked at me dismissively, as if I’d suggested his mother was moonlighting slinging envs.

“No, it can’t be. Their envs are too similar. We recently converted a failing stable into a testing rig for horse-grooming robots. Guess [...]

---

First published:
July 29th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87SzarZDjywv6nwSd/intellectual-property

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Intellectual Property” by Nina Panickssery

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Intellectual Property” by Nina Panickssery