Tell HN: If your idea is worth stealing, AI makes it easy. NDA or not
1 comments
You gotta tell us who did this so we know never to give them anything again
I'm afraid it doesn't even matter in this case. It can be anyone - with AI your ideas and expertise (which is what you're valued for - either as individual or a firm) are too easy to reproduce.
But I will share here when we're clear sharing :)
But I will share here when we're clear sharing :)
We got it working. Signed paying customers. Started building a real business. Another large company approached us for an evaluation. NDA signed. Over an extended period we shared everything — architecture, internals, custom builds, APIs. We thought we were closing the deal that would take us to the next level.
The deal never closed. They paid nothing. Then one of their engineers published an open-source library making all the same non-obvious decisions we made. The ones that took us six years and our savings to get right. Built on a corporate account, during work hours.
The code wasn't copied. The knowledge was. Knowing what to build, which approaches work and which don't, which design tradeoffs to make and why. That's the only thing that matters now — because AI handles the rest.