Generative AI has fundamentally changed the friction of writing code. Recently, I looked at a few websites I built with subscription site builders and considered the ethics of using an LLM to convert those visual designs into independently hosted HTML.

As someone who builds technical infrastructure for legal environments, I find this to be a significant ethical gray area that is coming up more often as AI tools make coding tasks more accessible. AI makes it incredibly easy to feed a screenshot to a model like Claude and ask it to interpret the visual layout. It is crucial to note that Claude is not copying or scraping the underlying source code. It simply looks at the site's general aesthetic and writes entirely new code from scratch. Still, this capability forces us to separate the strict legal right to copy from the ethical obligations we owe to developers and designers.