Fragile Constraints: What Happens When AI Makes Rewriting Free

On March 4, 2026, Dan Blanchard released chardet 7.0 — a ground-up rewrite of the Python character detection library. The original chardet was a port of Mozilla's character detection code, carrying LGPL copyleft requirements. A clean rewrite means new code, potentially a new license. Years of copyleft protection become renegotiable when reproducing behavior without copying expression is feasible. The next day, Armin Ronacher — creator of Flask, Jinja, Ruff — published " AI and the Ship of Theseus ." His term is slopfork : an AI-generated rewrite that reproduces behavior while shedding legal obligations. The GPL's power always depended on one assumption: rewriting code from scratch is expensive enough that nobody would bother. AI broke that assumption. The lock didn't crack — the door dissolved. This isn't hypothetical. It's happening now. I keep finding this pattern everywhere. Not just in code licensing. In security. In platform strategy. In art. Some constraints survive the dissoluti