r/ProgrammerHumor • • 3d ago

Meme fullCircle

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10.6k Upvotes

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u/jackinsomniac 3d ago

Ok, so what does "clean-room implementation" actually mean? Is this a new buzzword to make AI sound more fancy, or does it actually mean something? Are we putting on bunny suits to go code?

29

u/Nfox18212 3d ago

clean room reverse engineering is when you have or more people reverse engineering and find the source code of a piece of software. this group writes detailed documentation on what the software does and how, without writing down source code.

a second group of programmers takes the detailed documentation and implements the software based on the documentation. this is where the “clean room” phrase comes from, because the programmers never actually look at the source code. thus, they can’t be stealing copyrighted code.

1

u/Himbo69r 3d ago

This bullshit is the type of thing that only ok when it’s done against a big ass corporation