The value of software has never been tied to the cost of writing it, even if you don't distribute it your still breaking the law.

The article is proceeding from the premise that a reimplementation is legal (but evil). To help my understanding of your comment, do you mean:

1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could write.

2. You read my example as "copying a project without distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same functionality just for me"