As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context.
A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern.
One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical.
Took him a week after work. It's not as stable, the unit-tests need more work, the code has some unnecessary duplication, hosting isn't fully figured out, but the end-to-end test-harness is even more stable than their own.
"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical.
Took him a week after work. It's not as stable, the unit-tests need more work, the code has some unnecessary duplication, hosting isn't fully figured out, but the end-to-end test-harness is even more stable than their own.
"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
Noodling on this at the moment.