Stealing Is a Skill

https://ben-mini.com/2026/stealing-is-a-skill

by bewal416 • 28 days ago

268 151 28 days ago

ben-mini.com

m8ven• 28 days ago

Good artists copy, great artists steal?

Still hurts to be the one being stolen from though.

lackoftactics• 28 days ago

there are only limited number of patterns for ui,ux, CTA. It sucks to be stolen from, but we build on top of each other most of the time

omegastick• 28 days ago

I'm a big fan of that quote, but always took it differently than the meaning associated with this article.

Good artists see an idea and use it. Great artists see an idea and _make it their own_.

Folcon• 28 days ago

I don't think this is the same kind of stealing?

If you're being a great artist who steals you may perfectly reproduce something, but in such a different and novel context that it feels fresh, or taking something verbatim and then modifying it with your work, vs say taking an series of ideas from a work and then not really changing or moving from what they were originally expressing

An example of this is from Offworld Trading Company[0], which literally started by copying the market from Age of Empires[1] and then iterated on it as well as the auction mechanics from MULE[2], I vaguely recall them talking about this in their GDC talk[3], though I could be misremembering that(it's a good talk though)

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if anyone who was stolen from in those cases feels hurt by it

Compare that to stealing, where the parties stolen from were really quite angry at what was stolen, Triple Town vs Yeti Town[4], which very much looked like a lazy clone

-[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/Offworld_Trading_C...

-[1]: https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Market_(Age_of_Empires_...

-[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.

-[3]: Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2C4z_apu2I

-[4]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/spry-fox-and-the-clone-wars

zelias• 28 days ago

This game slapped

graemep2• 28 days ago

Does this level of copying not imply a copyright infringement?

efilife• 28 days ago

Even if not, it's really, really distasteful

graemep2• 28 days ago

Proudly admitting it in public seems foolish on both grounds.

N_Lens• 28 days ago

The Tim Ferris school of thought. Can’t say I agree with it.

cjcenizal• 28 days ago

My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”

ecshafer• 28 days ago

A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller". But the people who have extremely little exposure to the field, and have only ever played one game (D&D typically) ends up re-exploring the field with "new ideas" that have existed for decades and have already been iterated upon.

jdub3• 28 days ago

Cheat: "That's in GURPS. Uh huh, GURPS. Seen it: GURPS. Good idea, really nicely executed in GURPS. You'll like how GURPS did that." :-D

hardlianotion• 28 days ago

Oh Traveller! It has been such a long time since I thought about it. Have I still got those manuals, I wonder?

conartist62• 28 days ago

And then, if you are great, you will steal not from one thing but from everything

euroderf• 28 days ago

This sounds like the manifesto of an Andy Warhol LLM.

worldthruword• 28 days ago

there is negative stealing or avoiding mistakes done by others. as propounded by Warren Buffet and others. and epitomized by philosophy of being less wrong.

pnexk• 28 days ago

In a similar vein, one of my favorite HN comments in the context of the modernist movement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243252

jdub3• 28 days ago

(It feels very grumpy-old-man to complain about "low effort", but I think it's more culturally relevant than ever before...)

... not investigating your field is a massive low effort failure mode. You don't have to know your field, but you have to investigate it, appreciate it, draw upon it... even, or perhaps especially, if you're standing in opposition to it.

(This is also why "first principles" twits like Elon are so annoying...)

emaro• 28 days ago

I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.

libria• 28 days ago

Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.

As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?

The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.

kej• 28 days ago

The sorites paradox says that removing a grain of sand from a heap doesn't stop it from being a heap, and yet we can do that until we are left with a single grain of sand which is clearly not a heap.

Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.

iammjm• 28 days ago

Clearly the act of combining various elements into a coherent whole is the added value here. Like musicians which take various samples and sounds and combine them into something novel and harmonic

sillysaurusx4• 28 days ago

I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg

Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/

If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.

https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html

I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.

nusl3• 28 days ago

In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.

jmercouris• 28 days ago

Why did you do this?

parliament32• 28 days ago

[flagged]

carlosjobim• 28 days ago

I thought the same at first, but they are copying somebody's old and retired design, ie the other company doesn't use that design anymore.

deltamidway• 28 days ago

Stealing is a source of flattery. I've had logos I've designed outright copied. Jokes on them: They discovered they could not copyright the mark and had to rebrand (again).

Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.

meander_water• 28 days ago

However, it’s your job to go down the rabbit hole, learn the 100%, and sprinkle in your 3%.

I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.

sscaryterry• 28 days ago

Very, and really very few things, especially in software engineering is novel or new. Everything is the same old concepts, repackaged, tweaked, renamed. Cyclical in nature, fads come and go.

Stealing in this context might be tad harsh.

nusl3• 28 days ago

I think copying a website like this is very poor taste regardless. If I see you doing this, I immediately lose trust in your product and will immediately leave.

If you can't put the effort into the face of your product, how can I trust you to put effort into the product itself? Shitty behavior, with a shitty justification self-affirmation blogpost.

sdellis• 28 days ago

I agree. It's telling that they picked such a boring and generic design to steal.

wnmurphy2• 28 days ago

I think the author's choice of words is framing the discussion. They did build their own website, but they loved the look of the one they saw, so I'd think a better choice would be "inspired by" rather than "stolen from."

dghlsakjg2• 28 days ago

Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work.

If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.

It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.

This seems like the web design version of this.

patrickscoleman• 28 days ago

Obligatory link to a relevant Jorge Luis Borges story: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (about an author who copied Don Quixote word for word)

https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

tokai• 28 days ago

Pierre Menards Quixote is not a copy. It is a perfect recreation. While it is word-for-word identical to the original, the whole ironic humor of Borges text is that it is not a copy.

Edit: Which you might know well enough. Just wanted to add some more context.

dchftcs2• 28 days ago

A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.

antonvs2• 28 days ago

No. They're trained on the data, but there's no point in training at which they go through some exercise that involves creating copies of some of their input using the model being trained.

In any case, why is it "a bit tough to say this"? You thought your ability to learn was irreproducible?

pjm331• 28 days ago

i have a vague memory of hunter s thompson talking about sitting down and typing out the great gatsby to see how it would feel to write a great american novel

fenomas• 28 days ago

Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.

adrianstoll• 28 days ago

Ben Franklin did this as well. He writes about this exercise in his autobiography.

Xmd5a• 27 days ago

Well I did not learn to write, but came to appreciate a certain kind of minimalism by using a recursive 4-stages narrative model (Greimas) to study some novels by Haruki Murakami.

What really struck me was the fact every single segment down to the level of phrases had a well-delimited function with respect to the rest of the story. A well told story is like a perfect tiling. No gaps that couldn't possibly be closed, no overlap, every tile well-delimited and composing nicely with its neighbors, and more importantly, a way to decompose well aligned tiles (summaries) into well-aligned subtiles (elaborations): if these conditions are met, you'll be able to write a story that conserves something at every scale, i.e. coherence, and hopefully the interest of the reader!

wnmurphy2• 28 days ago

This was my first thought as well. Hunter S. Thompson used to copy Hemingway by hand to internalize his cadence.

egl2020• 28 days ago

This also works in drawing and painting. One of my painting teachers used to admonish us: "copy, copy, copy".

adamddev12• 28 days ago

Jazz musicians also copy each other's solos for learning and practice purposes, but they would never actually perform more than a couple well placed quotes or licks from another player.

BHSPitMonkey2• 28 days ago

I think there's a big difference between jazz and corporate landing pages. Should we be surprised or shocked when different brands of microwave ovens have very similar controls?

Upvoter33• 28 days ago

Also connected: many composers would write out previous great works, to learn them more deeply. Bach as I recall would do this.

thisislife2• 28 days ago

I too wanted to make this point. In art and designing, copying is how you learn and how you kick start your creativity and innovativeness.

mannanj4• 28 days ago

I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine:

stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice

I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments about copying someones digital creation doesn't really mean you took what they had from them, you just made a copy, though this doesn't logically apply to if I also physically stole someones product and made a copy since copyright/patent protection likely applies)

anonyfox• 28 days ago

the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).

mannanj4• 27 days ago

why not? I'm curious what you define as "property". Does property have to be physical?

For example if you felt your body and your mind was your property, if someone else copied your mind and was now profiting off of that without your consent, would you not feel that harmful to you?

sokoloff• 28 days ago

fetishize, herbicide and normalize

I’m very curious what “herbicide” was an auto-complete for here…

Noumenon72• 28 days ago

ChatGPT guesses "heroicize".

MCP1232• 28 days ago

It's stealing when copyright is infringed and when the stealing part is not acknowledged. Otherwise, can we called it "inspired by"?

__MatrixMan__• 28 days ago

No, that's just copyright infringement. It's stealing when the stolen thing is no longer accessible to the previous owner.

Consensus differs on whether both, or just one, is morally objectionable. Conflating them is problematic.

MCP1232• 28 days ago

Agreed. Copying pixel by pixel feels wrong and also not very creative.

a4isms• 28 days ago

There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when paper was still a thing was to have a "Swipe File," which was a collection of things you saw and liked, on paper.

In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.

That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:

https://www.swipe.com/about

nullbio• 28 days ago

Mintlify "stole" their latest design off Stripe. It's very obvious.

PashaGo• 28 days ago

Most great products are nothing, but well-timed and well-executed stolen ideas.

a3w• 28 days ago

Off-topic; but the nerd in me complained:

In GURPS, stealing is two skills: filch and pickpocket.

jdub3• 28 days ago

Whoa, I just mentioned GURPS in a completely different context in this very comment thread. :explodinghead:

erikschoster• 28 days ago

In a marketplace, this is theft. (Which, given this example is of a website for a for-profit product, seems appropriate.) In a community it's tradition. Building on traditions in a community (aka great artists steal) is different than trying to get yours in a marketplace. Art and community traditions aren't a competition until they are dragged into the marketplace.

sandcat_• 28 days ago

I feel like there’s a difference between Virgil Abloh being brought in to work on an iteration of the Air Force 1s and simply ripping off a design from an unrelated company, presumably without permission, and making a few tweaks.

devin• 28 days ago

Isn't it also well-documented that Virgil Abloh stole more in the ~100% range from up-and-coming designers who then saw nothing for their work?

underlipton3• 28 days ago

If it is, I'm sure that you can easily produce that documentation.

michaelfm12112• 28 days ago

This feels wrong.

InsideOutSanta• 28 days ago

Yeah, this is kinda crazy. This isn't stealing some ideas, their website is a printscreen of the original with some colors shifted. I doubt this is even legal.

willchis• 28 days ago

The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...

sejje• 28 days ago

Really love the "eye-grabbing top fold"

::looks at bootstrap hero styling::

Oh, right.

ge96• 28 days ago

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

dghlsakjg2• 28 days ago

I went to the Mintlify page they copied.

Don’t actually know what the product is and why it might be valuable to me.

Sure is pretty though.

dunham• 28 days ago

God I miss the old internet.

I recently discovered that the author of gzip still retains that 90's feel on his home page: http://gailly.net/

z3t4• 28 days ago

What do you do if your version becomes immensely more popular and successful then the thing you copied? When people start calling you a genius.

michaelfm12112• 28 days ago

"Yes your honor, I copied it pixel-by-pixel."

65• 28 days ago

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

ohitsdom• 28 days ago

Isn't this essentially what LLMs do?

Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.

NichoPaolucci• 28 days ago

When people finally offload 100% of their brain and forget how to use their creative reasoning abilities my guess is we’ll just all use Tailwind defaults across the board. No need to try new things, nobody will experiment because it’s so easy not to!

(Joking, mostly) but we did see this with Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc. the masses converge on simple web experiences because it’s pretty easy to get something that “just works”.

Chu4eeno• 28 days ago

Only if you set the temperature at 0.

Otherwise you get the divinely inspired result of nvidia's PRNG implementation.

dinkleberg• 28 days ago

The key is stealing from multiple sources. Grab 3+ different sites that you really love and extract the elements that really resonate from each and meld them together into your own synthesis. Copying wholesale and tweaking a couple of things is lame IMO. That being said, pixel-perfect copywork is a fantastic exercise for improving your design skills.

gobdovan• 28 days ago

Actual stealing is an even more impressive skill. Usually involves intensively trained sleight of hand, elaborate ruses, a very good understanding of theory of mind regarding the victim's attention, and planned deescalation paths in case you're caught.

scaradim• 28 days ago

Stealing is indeed a skill... and a sin (target missed) - by experience not good for soul. Knowing what laws in the countries where your business evolve allow someone to get inspired (as state of the art) or reuse freely from other's work in specific industry is a more valuable skill... and better for soul. One could move smarter and faster with light soul around if rules of the game are known and all opportunities are considered and not missed.

darepublic• 28 days ago

I remember working for a somewhat careless manager.. he just pointed at the chrome web dev store and said 'make it look like this'. I could have just copied everything wholesale but I actually handcrafted all the css, borrowing but generally using my own HTML structure, and js. The final result impressed even me. It made me feel.. if I worked on a team with real designers I could create something I would be proud of.

Rodmine• 28 days ago

OK, Benjamin.

efitz• 28 days ago

“Stealing is a skill” is catchy but doesn’t express the underlying concept as well as your other principles. I would suggest “learn by copying good things”, or “quality work is where you find it” or something to that effect.

jdw64• 28 days ago

Good artists copy, great artists steal. but this article doesn't seem to be about that.

chasing• 28 days ago

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Plagiarists also steal.

myaccountonhn• 28 days ago

Person learns the idea that being unethical pays of sometimes. And therefore, ethics don't matter.

WaitWaitWha• 28 days ago

When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection.

I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.

(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)

xyzzy_plugh• 28 days ago

I agree. In fact, it's even worse: often times you miss the tradeoffs.

With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.

I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.

We learned a lot.

antonvs2• 28 days ago

I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

The very definition of "cargo cult" in a software context.

omnimus2• 27 days ago

I think you romanticize it quite a bit. Painters/artists like any professionals are mostly there just to do the work. Even with Mona Lisa It's very likely that nobody that day cared about smell of the model it was just one other day at the office.

What copying does really teach you is how to actually put the paint on the canvas, how to actually make the image, how to see the details. That's the reason why copying is one of the most common learning techniques in visual arts.

Good luck painting by smelling the emotions and atmosphere of the moment.

CM30• 28 days ago

while the article may be making the process sound more meaningful than it actually is, I think there's a definite benefit to learning by trying to copy others, then making tweaks as you go. Honestly, it can be quite interesting to code your own version of a tool you plan to use, then compare the code to the original to see how you both handled things differently. Or to just look at a random website/app/footage of the same and try to figure out how everything works there.

sd9• 28 days ago

Good artists copy, great artists steal, plagiarists copy and paste CSS wholesale

9p• 28 days ago

Anything for a buck!

rglover• 28 days ago

This isn't stealing in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" sense. This is just straight copying/plagiarism.

To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."

doginasuit• 28 days ago

The original idea probably came from T.S. Eliot who said "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Imitation is surface level, but stealing here means to take inspiration and make it your own, transformation.

adrianwaj• 28 days ago

Isn't the cost of this mimicry originality? Also, there may be a "cover up" and a weight to the conscience in that non-attribution too.

It's sort of like the whole idea of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" but I've always thought, "why would you want your enemies close?" Would that involve deception? Do the enemies start off as friends until they become close and then there's a switch to loving the devil?

I saw a t-shirt once: "they can steal your style but not your originality." Gemini agreed. https://share.gemini.google/gA5aqbmA9AwO Gemini would know all about that. Gemini isn't the only one - the "creative fields" can be anything but. Checkout my page '2X' for ex_samples : https://future-secured.com/39599

tamimio• 28 days ago

Technically, everything is stealing and everyone is stealing others work, you might use an open source software, might build your own but uses someone else’s libraries, might take someone’s UI design like OP, someone might use someone’s components, dig deeper and someone is using the icons to build components, dig deeper and someone’s is using a software with builtin tools trained to make similar icons to others, really, there’s no bottom to it. And if you decide to reinvent the whole wheel from the little details, you definitely will have so many bugs and issues, and most likely no one will likes it because it’s fundamentally different than how they are used to use XYZ.

gizajob• 28 days ago

– when you get it wrong, people treat you with the contempt they reserve for a thief.

pseudosavant• 28 days ago

I've gone through my own cycle of this as a musician. Early in my music experience I was always obsessed with originality, and wouldn't learn a lot of existing pieces. At the stage I'm at now, I find great value in learning great songs and understanding why they work.

There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.

RobRivera• 28 days ago

This is the way

klondike_klive• 27 days ago

It's taken me reaching my fifties and entering an entirely new career to realise this. That arrogance and ambition of youth, the hard-line unwillingness to compromise and study other people's work really held me back!

argee• 28 days ago

    When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
    He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
    An' what he thought 'e might require,
    'E went an' took - the same as me!
    
    The market-girls an' fishermen,
    The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
    They 'eard old songs turn up again,
    But kep' it quiet - same as you!
    
    They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
    They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
    But winked at 'Omer down the road,
    An' 'e winked back - the same as us!
    
    - Rudyard Kipling

gaigalas• 28 days ago

At the beginning of my career, I believed I’d be rewarded for the originality of my ideas. The truth is that you’re rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently.

The "I'll be original and get directly rewarded" vision is indeed naive.

However, sometimes you get to a point in which you design original ideas precisely so they will be stolen, and making that work for you is part of the design.

IAmGraydon• 28 days ago

Don't do this. It's really a terrible idea. He's comparing Virgil Abloh being asked to create an evolution of the Air Force 1 and blatantly ripping off an already boring website (and in the same product category, no less). The two have nothing in common, obviously. You should build your own identity, and you do this by understanding your customers. If you want to create a boring copy of already existing work, well that's what we have LLMs for.

That said, we all take influence from the work of others who we admire. If you're going to steal, take the parts you like best from 10 different projects, improve every single one, and recombine them in a new way. That's how artists "steal".

zuzululu• 28 days ago

and this is why artists get up in arms about AI is because they know they are guilty of stealing and that all of their work is largely just inspirations upon inspirations and now they have to compete with AI

It reminds me of this old country song:

    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major
    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major

agilek• 28 days ago

Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs? I think the line is pretty clear here. I remember the old Dan Mall's article on this topic which is much more inspirational (and "correct"): https://medium.com/@danielmall/stealing-your-way-to-original...

BHSPitMonkey2• 28 days ago

Do you not believe that the design of the "stolen" landing page was not itself 97% stolen from marketing landing pages that came before it?

It's unusual seeing the process stated so bluntly, but for something as cookie-cutter as a company homepage this has been how web designers have done things for decades. Or, at the very least, it's how the craft is learned.

simonw• 28 days ago

I don't think it was.

I think the Mintlify designers viewed dozens if not hundreds of examples, then thought very carefully about exactly what they needed to express for their page and how best to express it. Then they built their page step by step, sweating over every detail.

Then Kibu came along, lifted the entire thing, changed "3%" of it and called it their own.

What Kibu did is gross.

lofaszvanitt2• 28 days ago

A breakneck race toward absolute decline.

TacticalCoder• 28 days ago

Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs?

Yes and the reason is not subtle...

We'll see much more of that now: people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.

It's crystal clear why: LLMs are very good at copying / stealing / tweaking.

What's not clear though is how are licenses, including the open-source ones, respected here?

I'm not just talking about copying a website pixel-for-pixel: I'm talking about things like re-implementing a compiler, supposedly from scratch, when we all know it's not at all a clean room implementation.

Expect a wave of "theft is good" from the same people who are pushing 24/7 "buy commercial AI models subscriptions" content (which I have btw so no need to sell me more of them).

We bet that vibecoding would allow us to move faster

"Theft is good"

alberto-m• 28 days ago

people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.

History rhymes, indeed. Almost two centuries ago, Balzac wrote:

A man spends ten years of his life searching for an industrial secret, a machine, some kind of discovery, he takes out a patent, he believes he is master of his thing, he is followed by a competitor who, if he has not foreseen everything, perfects his invention with a screw, and thus takes it out of his hands. [Illusions perdues, 1843]

lofaszvanitt2• 28 days ago

Lots of people who pretend to be ostriches. :DDD And the really, really sad thing is that they can't even steal proper things, they steal the shit. Just like when yters and tiktokkers copy every stupid thing from each other, without thinking about it for 3 seconds. Total decline.

naet• 28 days ago

There's a popular quote: "good artists copy, great artists steal". I've always interpreted "steal" in that context as taking a technique or an inspiration from something, but making it fully your own in your execution (in contrast to direct copying, where you have just made a reproduction).

Given that interpretation, taking someone else's website and changing 3% of it feels more like copying than stealing, even more so when you see the side by side comparison image and it looks completely the same. I love to take inspiration from all over the place, but I like to think I transform it more into my own vision than the author here. I think making a direct copy of something can sometimes be a good learning exercise in the right context, but I would follow it up with your own novel work that maybe uses some concepts you learned from that copying exercise.

As an aside: the current Mintlify marketing site, not the one copied in the article, reads to me as heavily inspired by Stripe's marketing website. Not as direct a copy as the article here though.

m3kw9• 28 days ago

In UI they call that "Affordance"

artur_makly• 28 days ago

Everything is a REMIX https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=W64XCy3RDiL2l80z

0815beck• 28 days ago

"It was around January 2020. I became the head coach of a youth basketball team.

I was a few months into my first job out of college, and I was feeling… empty"

no wonder... i d be feeling empty too if copying was my job

mpalmer• 28 days ago

These are solid conclusions/lessons to take away for people working in creative disciplines. Enforcing constraints on yourself can be rewarding and productive (the 3% rule), and forcing yourself to pay attention to other people's work is challenging but invaluable. Even less than stellar work has things to teach.

And can I just say, thank you for writing something you can read in five minutes. Incredibly grateful for someone who respects the reader by not dropping 3,000 words on them - easy though it may be.

c-hendricks• 28 days ago

I find this despicable. Of course, recreate something to understand it better, learn from it, or just if you like it (there's plenty of songs I play because it's a fun song to play, or really nice to listen to).

But the intention to blatantly copy and then pass off as your own, that is just bereft of creativity.

pir8life4me• 28 days ago

This is only 3% originality and 97% theft. That's 3% unrealized profits.

Look into Yellowism: one signature and its 100% yours.

gaiagraphia• 28 days ago

Would've been pretty dire if the original firestarter accused other humans of theft.

I just struggle to care about people complaining about 'ideas being stolen'. Make it, or don't, it really doesn't bother me.

donatj• 28 days ago

I spent way too much time trying to figure out if this is satire. I'm pretty sure it's not.

This is what we've come to as a society? Completely given up on creativity and skill for literally while talking up the joys of stealing.

zeusdclxvi• 28 days ago

Well, I have level 99 Thieving on RuneScape

nashashmi• 28 days ago

Summing up the first line with 3 advices: increase your vulnerability, or increase: transparency, creativity, and reflection. My first thought is this guy lives in a healthy non-toxic environment. Here he comes up with "stealing is a skillset" because skillfully determining what to change is huge, and a major effort of the focused change.

But that ain't stealing. That is copying. And then twisting it per your desires. Real stealing steals just one or two elements.

lukeweston1234• 28 days ago

I'm a fan of stealing as well, but I normally try to steal from a variety of sources. If you just copy a painting or novel and barely change anything, you're not an artist. But if you copy dozens of works from a variety of your favorite inspirations, at the end you are left with something recognizable, yet wholly new, and your own.

boesboes• 28 days ago

And we wonder why everything is so unbearably boring & bland...

That comparison is quite the stretch imo, this feels more like copying homework. And if we are honest about what is being sold here: normalization of stealing other peoples work with AI and pretending you are a smarter, better person for it.

bingoMen• 28 days ago

Wallace finds something more than just a design problem. Explaining how people think. We don't think in isolation. We think through mimesis (also known as copying).

When a child is learning language, they're not making up new sounds. They're just copying. When a musician learns jazz, they first write down the solos exactly as they are played, before improvising. When a scientist understands a proof, they work through it step-by-step, following the same steps as the person who first thought of it. Copying something isn't the same as thinking. It is thinking.

The people who move fastest aren't the ones who are trying to be the most original. They're the ones who've studied the old masters so well that their new ideas seem natural, not forced. They have copied so much that they can finally trust their instincts to break the pattern.

In this sense, stealing is the mental work of becoming, not just copying, but creating.

vlark• 27 days ago

Stealing isn't a skill. Finding a way to not be held accountable for stealing is a skill. That's why lawyers charge so much.

thepeoplebook• 26 days ago

You have to copy before you can surpass. That's how every craft works. Painting, music, writing, code. You internalize the patterns first, then you start breaking them on purpose.

Stealing Is a Skill

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