> I don't remember the exact case now, but someone was cloning a program (Lotus123 -> Quatro or Excel???). They printed every single screen and made a team write a full specification in English. Later another separate team look at the screenshots and text and reimplement it. Apparently meatballs can get tainted, but the plain English text loophole was safe enough.

This is close to how I would actually recommend reimplementing a legacy system (owned by the re-implementer) with AI SWE. Not to avoid copyright, but to get the AI to build up everything it needs to maintain the system over a long period of time. The separate team is just a new AI instance whose context doesn’t contain the legacy the code (because that would pollute the new result). The amplify isn’t too apt though since there is a difference between having something in your context (which you can control and is very targeted) and the code that the model was trained on (which all AI instance will share unless you use different models, and anyways, it isn’t supposed to be targeted).