Intellectual Property

A short story

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 working quietly. Most of them had a Claude Code window open. Only Simpson had a private office. I walked in and greeted him.

“Thank you so much for coming. Is there anything you need from me or will you just get started?”

“I suppose I need a pretext under which to speak to all your employees. Perhaps I can say that I’m considering taking a job here and wanted to find out what it’s like to work at Programize.”

“You’re a prospective Programoid? Sounds good to me!”

I walked out of Simpson’s office and approached the engineer sitting outside.

“Hey, nice to meet you! I’m thinking of working with you guys but wanted to swing by the place first. What are you working on right now?”

“I’m building a dog tastebud simulator. It’ll serve as one of the reward terms in our dog food formulation env.”

“Is all your work animal-themed? Simpson told me about the horse-grooming robots…”

“Oh absolutely not. Go speak to Kyle over there—he works on chess.”

I approached Kyle, noticing a stack of chess boards and boxes of unusual chess pieces underneath his desk.

“Hey Kyle! I heard you work on chess? Would be curious to learn more about what you’re building. I’m checking out the office today, thinking to join you Programoids.”

“Ah yes… chess. Well actually I am building chess pieces, in CAD software. Have you seen those novelty chess sets? There are all these cool designs. I build mockups of them for AI models to recreate. But I’ll be honest, the main reason I chose this project is because I love 3D-printing custom chess sets. I’ll probably be fired soon anyway.”

This was my first lead, I thought. The guy thinks he’ll be fired, so maybe he’d be willing to make a quick buck by leaking?

“Why would you be fired?”

“Well to be honest this task is totally saturated. The models recreate my chess sets perfectly based on a single blurry image.”

“Huh, I see… By the way, I was wondering what you thought of Purge, if you’ve heard of them. They’re a competitor to you guys. You see, I have an offer from them too, and I’m trying to figure out who to join.”

Kyle looked surprised.

“Purge? But I thought they were a so-called superlean startup. The founder says he’s not looking to hire more people. They just have a few guys puppetting a gazillion AI agents.”

“Well I know I’m wearing a baggy hoodie but I work out! I’m 9% body fat right now. Maybe lean enough for them?”

This made Kyle laugh.

I spent another few hours walking around and talking to employees. They were all working on crazy things. I couldn’t see why AI labs were keen to buy these strange RL environments. Novelty chess sets? Grooming horses? I had previously believed that all the money was in “agentic coding”, but an employee had explained that this was basically saturated and models were actually on the cusp of repetitive strain injury, so much coding were they doing (I didn’t ask how a computer could get RSI). And so apparently now there was only a market for weird niche tasks that AIs still don’t tend to see on the Internet.

I wasn’t making much progress. The only relevant tidbit I had gleaned was that there was this one guy, Kyle, who thought he will be fired soon. There was another thing I could do, though—I could visit the Purge office.

---

The Purge office was a single room above a shop selling fried chicken. I could count five tall, skinny men sitting at desks staring at terminal windows. Lean indeed. At the front of the office sat a young woman, evidently the receptionist, who waved at me.

She introduced herself as Sarah Chen. A strangely familiar name.

“You must be the detective,” she noted, before I’d opened my mouth.

I gave her my line anyway. “I’ve got an offer from Programize but I heard about your superlean operation and got intrigued. Wanted to see whether you folks were also hiring—”

One of the engineers pulled off his headphones and swiveled around, grinning.

“Relax,” he said. “You did great. Probably better than the last three.”

He gestured for me to sit down next to him. Purge, he explained, mainly sold a single env.

“Corporate espionage,” he said. “Get inside a company, get that sweet sweet IP, don’t get caught. We pull out all the stops to make the environment realistic, including pulling a real detective into the matter.”

“But at least maybe now you can tell me who’s the mole?” I said. “You must have someone inside Programize.”

“More like something. We have compromised their systems and our AI agents are monitoring all their work.”

“Why are you telling me this? You know I’m working for Simpson.”

“That’s ok, he’ll understand. I’ll call him now and explain that one of his big clients commissioned us to build this corporate espionage env. He won’t want to mess up the relationship. You can just go home.”

I walked out of the Purge office feeling glad. I had entirely failed to solve the case and made a fool of myself but I was walking away with a big payment from Programize and a big payment from Purge. Two paydays in my pocket and not one honest thing to show for either—that was the San Francisco way. I was ready to be part of an RL env all over again.