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Comment by newtonapple | Hacker News Reader

I'm not arguing for either side, but here's a fun thought experiment I've been thinking about a lot lately. If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets? What if I trained a team of agents to think and code like me at work, then exported those agentic skills and took them with me to another company? At what point would they still be considered the old company's property? Let's say I didn't take any code or proprietary information from the old company, just the coding style and best practices my agents learned from the old company's live metrics. Is that considered stealing from the company? Is that any different from me learning those patterns and skills personally and then reapplying them elsewhere?

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There doesn't have to be any meaningful analogy here. Laws don't have to treat humans and machines equally. Laws are for people and allow things that are less than ideal, but necessary for people to function.

Humans can't leave their old brains at their previous employer, can't delete their experience learned on proprietary data. It wouldn't make sense for the law to fight this.

But the law can control what can be done with information stored outside of your brain.

Your training of a team of agents is a product you developed while working for that company and would be owned by them. You could in theory train a new team of agents after leaving the company, but it could not be trained on anything that isn't in your brain. If you gave it anything, like the old company's live metrics, then you'd be stealing trade secrets. The key difference from you personally learning those skills is that an agent trained on company data turns personal knowledge into a portable, structured artifact, which crosses from "your skill" into something that looks a lot more like company property.

This is my personal conclusion as well. But think about where this leads. In the future, agents will do most of the coding and our job is to guide and train them. Most of our skills would be externalized somehow, living in the agents instead of in our heads. Which means once you leave a company, you may have effectively lost a lot of your hard earned skills and experiences.

I'm pretty sure Marx has some things to say on this. When your skills live in company-owned agents instead of in your head, you've been alienated from your own labor in a way Marx predicted. This is exactly why companies like Meta have been so aggressive to integrate AI tools into the day-to-day work for their employees. The more your skills live in their systems, the less you can take with you.

> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets?

Human brains are in many ways privileged agents in a legal and copyright system, because it exists to serve the needs of humans.

Artifacts produced by human brains are not.

I don't understand the point of your question. The "problem" of an ex-employee consciously or subconsciously bringing his learned experiences at your company to a competitor is literally the reason why non-competes exist. In fact, this topic is quite old.

It is also illegal in CA.

My real point is this: if you're not allowed to bring your experiences with you, then the company exists to extract your creative thinking and skills. You can argue that's a fair trade for money. I don't necessarily disagree. But I think most of us find joy in learning, in building our own skills, in being able to reapply them elsewhere. And before LLMs and agents, I couldn't lose those skills and experiences no matter where I worked. As we progress, though, we've hit a point where we have to ask ourselves: at what price are we willing to trade complete ownership of our thinking and experiences for money?

> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets?

The fact that California allows this to happen (banning non-competes and rejecting "inevitable disclosure") is exactly why Silicon Valley started here and remains here. It's exactly why ex-OpenAI people could start Anthropic. It's why neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have a monopoly on AI today. It's great both for employees and for the general public.

No need to single out SV, non compete clauses are pretty much an American concept, hardly used in the rest of the world.

On my 50s and never saw one of those, that could be legally enforced anyway.

> At what point would they still be considered the old company's property?

It depends on your contracts (aka NDAs). Sometimes employers do ban for that very same reason from joining a competitor(s) for x years from date of separation

It also depends on your law. In California, some companies still try to put these restrictions into contracts, but that contradicts state law so it has no legal effect. The intended effect is intimidation, however, which may work with some people.

The difference is you’re a human with the right to self.

You’ve just described how consulting works

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