Tell HN: If your idea is worth stealing, AI makes it easy. NDA or not

We're a small team. >7 years of R&D, self-funded, friends-and-family money. We solved a hard problem in a way that experts told us couldn't work. Non-obvious architecture — dozens of design decisions that only make sense once you've tried all the alternatives that don't.

We got it working. Signed paying customers. Started building a real business. Another large company approached us for an evaluation. NDA signed. Over an extended period we shared everything — architecture, internals, custom builds, APIs. We thought we were closing the deal that would take us to the next level.

The deal never closed. They paid nothing. Then one of their engineers published an open-source library making all the same non-obvious decisions we made. The ones that took us six years and our savings to get right. Built on a corporate account, during work hours.

The code wasn't copied. The knowledge was. Knowing what to build, which approaches work and which don't, which design tradeoffs to make and why. That's the only thing that matters now — because AI handles the rest.