Intellectual Property

Last weekend I made myself a website. I had wanted to for ages—getting clients through word of mouth alone wasn’t cutting it. But only now, with Claude Code, was it easy enough. I was glad the marketing was paying off when I received an email from a potential client. It wasn’t the sort of client I was expecting. I was hoping to catch a few more cheating husbands and delinquent teenagers. Simpson, a young tech founder, was casually dressed in a t-shirt and jeans when he stepped into my office. “Our competitor—they seem to be selling the same RL environments to similar clients. Let’s say we build something and sell to lab X. Before we even get on a call with lab Y, we hear that they’ve already purchased the same envs from Purge. It’s very suspicious. Purge has barely any employees—they call themselves a superlean startup. But they are matching our output and quality. How?” “Maybe they are just good?” Simpson looked at me dismissively, as if I’d suggested his mother was moonlighting slinging envs. “No, it can’t be. Their envs are too similar. We recently converted a failing stable into a testing rig for horse-grooming robots. Guess who bought twenty horses in the town down the road?” “And so you think they have a man on the inside?” “Precisely! But I can’t figure out who. We have thirty employees, all of them seem to be fine upstanding folk. That’s where I need your help.” I turned up to the Programize office at 9am on Wednesday. Employees were sitting at their desks and workin…