Unicode Perturbations as Deliberate Friction: Framing AI Code Copy-Paste as a Design Boundary

arXiv 2608.22638·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

The paper argues that the moment model-generated text crosses from a chat window into executable software is an unmanaged design boundary, and that assistants should be judged not only on the code they generate but on how they mediate that handoff. It proposes soft barriers that preserve access to AI assistance while making unexamined transfer less frictionless, instantiated as Unicode output perturbations that stay visually readable but break naive copy-paste execution. Measuring Copy-Paste Resistance across HumanEval and MBPP with four LLMs and four perturbation families, the authors found output-level barriers can reach high resistance but effectiveness is strongly model- and task-dependent, with an exploratory pilot of 18 participants.