The only effective protection for software IP is hiding the logic on servers you control (SaaS). Anything released to execute on client hardware can be decompiled and cloned. This has always been the case but LLMs have made the issue more obvious.
But as sibling comment indicates, even that is no longer a guarantee. There are demonstrations and anecdotal accounts of reverse engineering entire features or even small applications, including the backend code, by pointing an LLM at the web UI: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/bla...
This is why I'm thinking that patents and other legal means are likely the only way forward to protect software that does not have a natural moat, like network effects or some huge data advantage. That is actually a huge amount of software.
My concern is that without proper protection software without such moats, this will create incentives for people building them to adopt less-than-ideal means of monetizing their work, e.g. the things that lead to enshittification.