As a dev how do I avoid exposing IP through coding assistants?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48728522

by dd-sharma • 23 days ago

1 3 23 days ago

news.ycombinator.com

I’m new to the community. I use coding assistants for the most part to - quickly get my refactoring done, root cause/ debugging, research of large logs and other tasks. So I’m sharing a large chunk of our code. I’m getting a bit concerned about the exposure of IP.

notrustincloud• 23 days ago

Have you ever heard the phrase, "shutting the barn door after the horses are gone" ?

This concern should be dealt with before leaking IP into the hands of the model owners.

It is a reasonable expectation that those owners will apply the same attitude to IP rights of the users of thd models that they have demonstrated during the training of those same models... that is to say, the willing disregard of anyone's IP in pursuit of their own enrichment.

It would seem that responsible protection of internal IP requires using hardware you own or at least fully control from the bare metal layer up, running models trained or distilled from public datasets which have been rigorously protective of privage IP rights.

or we can just all give up on the idea of knowledge and intellectual concepts as having any inherent limitability... our ideas are not 'the moat'.

The manner in which we engage with our customers will be the real moat. If anyone can recreate our software by asking the model to do the work, what is left for any business to differentiate from those copies becomes the ability to maintain a community of users/customers/participants.

saidnooneever• 23 days ago

if you already shared its kinda too late -_-. you share what you share, so dont share if u dont want to share. thats Bout the most accurate advice.

You can have the things debug and create code etc. without sharing the existing code base but its obviously less utility from the model then.

basically its just a choice / risk assessment.

Do you think model owners want to steal your specific idea and beat you to market? its not very likely, how you weight that risk should inform how much info u input to model

dd-sharma• 19 days ago

No, I don’t think model owners want to steal my data or IP. They already have too many smart people. The point is how it going through their training pipeline could potentially get exposed to actors who use their models.

As a dev how do I avoid exposing IP through coding assistants?

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