AI And The Ship of Theseus | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings
March 6, 2026
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes
re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my
libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different
design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same,
but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was
by going via the test suite.There are huge consequences to this. When the cost of generating code goes down
that much, and we can re-implement it from test suites alone, what does that
mean for the future of software? Will we see a lot of software re-emerging
under more permissive licenses? Will we see a lot of proprietary software
re-emerging as open source? Will we see a lot of software re-emerging as
proprietary?It’s a new world and we have very little idea of how to navigate it. In the
interim we will have some fights about copyrights but I have the feeling very
few of those will go to court, because everyone involved will actually be
somewhat scared of setting a precedent.
The first-order effects of transformative technologies are the ones we think about first, and the ones that are easiest to make at least some sort of predictions about. It’s the second-order effects, the impact on economics, the legal implications, that are much harder to reason about.
That’s what Armin Ronacher is doing here when he ponders the implications of increasingly inexpensive code generation, particularly of existing systems based simply on their API, and what consequences that will have in terms of software licencing and intellectual property.
