Stealing Is a Skill

I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.

(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)

If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.

It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.

This seems like the web design version of this.

To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."

There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.

Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.

When a child is learning language, they're not making up new sounds. They're just copying. When a musician learns jazz, they first write down the solos exactly as they are played, before improvising. When a scientist understands a proof, they work through it step-by-step, following the same steps as the person who first thought of it. Copying something isn't the same as thinking. It is thinking.

The people who move fastest aren't the ones who are trying to be the most original. They're the ones who've studied the old masters so well that their new ideas seem natural, not forced. They have copied so much that they can finally trust their instincts to break the pattern.

In this sense, stealing is the mental work of becoming, not just copying, but creating.

I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.

Stealing in this context might be tad harsh.

Given that interpretation, taking someone else's website and changing 3% of it feels more like copying than stealing, even more so when you see the side by side comparison image and it looks completely the same. I love to take inspiration from all over the place, but I like to think I transform it more into my own vision than the author here. I think making a direct copy of something can sometimes be a good learning exercise in the right context, but I would follow it up with your own novel work that maybe uses some concepts you learned from that copying exercise.

As an aside: the current Mintlify marketing site, not the one copied in the article, reads to me as heavily inspired by Stripe's marketing website. Not as direct a copy as the article here though.

But that ain't stealing. That is copying. And then twisting it per your desires. Real stealing steals just one or two elements.

That comparison is quite the stretch imo, this feels more like copying homework. And if we are honest about what is being sold here: normalization of stealing other peoples work with AI and pretending you are a smarter, better person for it.

    When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
    He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
    An' what he thought 'e might require,
    'E went an' took - the same as me!
    
    The market-girls an' fishermen,
    The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
    They 'eard old songs turn up again,
    But kep' it quiet - same as you!
    
    They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
    They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
    But winked at 'Omer down the road,
    An' 'e winked back - the same as us!
    
    - Rudyard Kipling

Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.

Still hurts to be the one being stolen from though.

If you can't put the effort into the face of your product, how can I trust you to put effort into the product itself? Shitty behavior, with a shitty justification self-affirmation blogpost.

I was a few months into my first job out of college, and I was feeling… empty"

no wonder... i d be feeling empty too if copying was my job

Look into Yellowism: one signature and its 100% yours.

In GURPS, stealing is two skills: filch and pickpocket.

But the intention to blatantly copy and then pass off as your own, that is just bereft of creativity.

This is what we've come to as a society? Completely given up on creativity and skill for literally while talking up the joys of stealing.

Copyright and it's huge industry of lawyers = an enforcer caste of the American empire.

I just struggle to care about people complaining about 'ideas being stolen'. Make it, or don't, it really doesn't bother me.

And can I just say, thank you for writing something you can read in five minutes. Incredibly grateful for someone who respects the reader by not dropping 3,000 words on them - easy though it may be.

The "I'll be original and get directly rewarded" vision is indeed naive.

However, sometimes you get to a point in which you design original ideas precisely so they will be stolen, and making that work for you is part of the design.

Plagiarists also steal.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

> stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice

I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments about copying someones digital creation doesn't really mean you took what they had from them, you just made a copy, though this doesn't logically apply to if I also physically stole someones product and made a copy since copyright/patent protection likely applies)

That said, we all take influence from the work of others who we admire. If you're going to steal, take the parts you like best from 10 different projects, improve every single one, and recombine them in a new way. That's how artists "steal".

It reminds me of this old country song:

    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major
    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
    What you base your happiness around? Material, women, and large paper
    That means you inferior, not major