Let's Stop Hoarding Code Like Dragons

For years, companies have treated their code like treasure: jealously guarded, locked away, rarely seen by outsiders. It’s understandable: skilled engineers spent years crafting it, so it must be valuable.

And it is, but mostly to you. In your systems, your workflows, with all the context and infrastructure that shaped it, with engineers that understand it, can maintain it and expand it. Outside that bubble, it’s far less useful. Code doesn’t travel well.

So why the obsession with locking it down? One of the louder objections to using LLMs for software development is the fear of code leakage. But let’s be honest: if a model picked up fragments of your code, would that really arm a competitor with anything meaningful? Compared to the risk of a disgruntled engineer emailing a zip file to themselves on their last day, it’s barely a blip. And more importantly: what are we missing out on while we worry? The bottleneck in most teams isn’t clever algorithms or top-secret business logic. It’s velocity. We’re drowning in valuable work we never get to. Integrating new data sources, building features users have been begging for, fixing bugs that we keep bumping down the backlog. If tools like LLMs and agentic coding can help us move faster - like markedly faster - that’s a huge win. If we can go from two weeks to two days for a new major feature that’s not just speed. That’s competitive advantage. And this brings us to a another opportunity if we do away with the code-as-a-secret-stance: open sourcing more of our code. Not because we expect strangers to flood in and fix our bugs or add features for us. But because working in public attracts the kind of engineers we want: those who enjoy learning in the open, who share their thinking, who give and receive feedback, and who care about clarity and improvement more than cleverness. It invites curiosity, collaboration and transparency. In a world where anyone can write code, it’s how we choose what to build, and how we work together, that really sets us apart.

Speaking here as an individual, not on behalf of my employer. Just sharing some thoughts I’ve been reflecting on as the tech landscape shifts.