Re: LLM based rewrites

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Mon, 2026-03-09 at 14:34 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:19:42 -0700
> James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:
> 
> > I don't think LLMs will be able to come up with the necessary proof
> > of separation without essentially recreating the clean room
> > process, which grows cost prohibitive as the complexity of the work
> > increases.
> 
> I con see one AI bot reading the original code, and then making the
> prompts to pass to a second AI bot to produce the code.
> 
> That is basically exactly how clean rooms work for humans. Now the
> question is, would courts agree that is a clean room?

well, yes, because you can demonstrate clean room separation which is
already legally acknowledged as independent invention.

My argument isn't that LLMs can't do this.  It's that doing it is way
more expensive than simply feeding the code into a LLM and asking for
independent reinvention, which is what the guy did to chardet.  In fact
I contend that reducing something to its API and then reconstructing it
is difficult to scale (and certainly is very costly in LLM tokens)
which is why we shouldn't necessarily fear it will be done to the
kernel.

Regards,

James