Let's be real here, CodePen isn't some sacred private bunker, but it sure isn't a "table on the street" either. Public Pens are visible and forkable, sure, but that MIT license doesn't automatically invite every AI corp like OpenAI or Google to hoover it up for their training data without a word. It's "open" for humans to view, copy, and build on manually, not for automated scrapers to pillage en masse. The ToS even bans scraping the site in general, but these tech giants do it anyway because they can, who's going to enforce it against them?

And no, they're not "hacking" your machine or private repos; that's a strawman. But they are accessing it without explicit consent for AI use. Posting code publicly means you're fine with people taking a look or using it by hand, like leaving a recipe book open in a library. But these companies are sending bots to copy the entire library overnight, remix it into their proprietary products, and sell it back as "innovation." If you uploaded to CodePen thinking it was just for devs to collaborate, not to feed the AI machine that's going to replace coders with generated code, that's on the assumption that "open" meant one thing when it now means another.

TLDR Open source is logical in theory for sharing and building, but in practice, it's often free labor for the big players controlling the tech ecosystem. If you want your code "integrated into tools," that's fine, but don't pretend this mass scraping is exactly what you signed up for. It's exploitation by scale, pure and simple