Hacker News Reader

Comment by dummydummy1234 | Hacker News Reader

So anyone have prior art we can point to? Because no way is a rpc call novel.

September 26, 2025: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/

Unfortunately there are many patents that simply combine an old thing with a new thing in the obvious way. Since the new thing is new, the combination is "novel".

Law says must be NON obvious

The patent office applies a much lower "non-obviousness" threshold than how a technical person would interpret that word.

It’s old memories from the engineering school in Europe but I remember that a patent office is about collecting fees and documents, and won’t do any actual checks on the patents validities.

Whether a patent is valid is tested in court.

Some countries don't examine patents for validity, some don't search prior art but leave it to the applicant. But plenty of countries do check for validity - including USA.

Interesting. They obviously don’t check very well if they do.

I didn't carefully read either of these, but it reminds me of https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ (note it predates the filing).

You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently

Isn't that patent similar to CodeAct [1], originally described in this paper [2]?

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/agent-framework/agents/cod...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030

/r/ChatGPT (or HN) since about 4-6 months after ChatGPT was released?

Tool calls were immediately obvious, and everyone and their dog was doing their own hacky version of it (today we call it "harness engineering") for a good year before OpenAI wrapped it up in an API.

Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).

In applications before the USPTO anyone can submit preissuance observations, afair, https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1134.html

The submitter needs to be identified, so get a friend/representative to submit if you want to maintain anonymity.

Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit

> but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit

Or an Inter Partes Review!

There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.

There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.

This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.

It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com