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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase.

If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc.

[0]: For example when I worked at Google, the proprietary google3 codebase cannot exist on laptops because there are no tools to download it to your laptop.

[1]: For example Claude code supports having a gateway: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway-connect

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I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that.

Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch of AI features suddenly became available. Free, no sub needed. A dev starts using them (because, why not?) and lo and behold the company's code got shipped out in an inference call and is now scheduled to be in the next training run. Oops.

How's that any different from, say, Windows updating and backing up the company's code to OneDrive?

Actions speak louder than words. If the company doesn't even supply and require work devices, they don't effectively consider their code to be valuable IP.

Is Microsoft mining their customers' backup files looking for source code to ingest into their model training pipeline?

Of course the company can still consider their code to be valuable IP.

You are merely describing companies that aspire to consider their code valuable IP, not companies that actually do so.

IDE updated? It’s the company IT’s job to perform testing before distributing those updates. And also their job to use whatever managed settings to disable those unmanaged AI features.

Yeah man I think we just have experience in two different worlds.

A single digit headcount startup with a "company IT" team testing program updates before distributing them??? Um, no. You just download VS Code (or whatever IDE you want) on the Macbook they give you and it updates when Microsoft pushes a public update.

Every company that is not Google lets you have code on your laptop. This is only an annoying thing that they came up with.

Mine doesn’t. They don’t even issue work laptops; work is done on desktops only.

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