Ronacher asks if LLMs are cloning independent builders' side projects

Armin Ronacher reflashed a CarPlay dongle into something he called CatPlay after Fable, Sol, and Kimi K3 each steered him toward the same project. The stakes are around who gets credit when three different models suggest the same project to different people.

He then found that an acquaintance had built nearly the same thing, arriving there through similar conversations with the same models. Ronacher lays out the full sequence in "Latent Powers", posted September 5.

He also cites Lucas Meijer, who noticed something similar at smaller scale. As models got better at generating HTML, producing an HTML report instead of Markdown became a default output, not a request anyone made.

Ronacher doesn't answer the question outright. He raises it: how much of what builders think they're inventing comes from eliciting the same latent capabilities from the same models? He has only his own case and one other person's to go on, no data on how common this is.