Around the time I started learning to really use AI, I had a friend in marketing whose results were stunning. Watching him work made me want to start producing things too, so I kept asking him questions, hoping I could eventually work the way he did.
Then one day I learned something that caught me completely off guard. He was not some AI wizard. He was simply taking other people's frameworks and presenting them as his own. My gut reaction was betrayal, since I always assumed copying was simply wrong. But the more we talked, the more I realized he was onto something. That conversation is what today's piece is about.
Usually, our first instinct when we want to achieve something is to learn it. But that era is over. The era of copying has begun. And how you copy is exactly what determines your competitive edge today.
The reason learning lost its throne is simple. The world changed. Top performers used to be the ones who hoarded the most references. Today, AI does that better than any human ever could. Because of this shift, you need to understand one concept: the Super Sample, the ultimate strategy for copying effectively.
Pay close attention here. This will change how you work.
What Exactly Is a Super Sample?
When you hear the word copying, it might instantly bring up negative connotations or sound like plagiarism. That is exactly why the concept of the Super Sample was born.
So what is a Super Sample?
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| Giving the food, the recipe, and the secret to perfection |
Think about the traditional meaning of a sample. When you go to the grocery store, there are tasting corners. Take nachos for example. Giving you a free piece of nacho is essentially a bait strategy to get you to buy the whole bag. That is the old school sample.
A Super Sample is different. The moment I hand you a piece of nacho, I also hand you the exact recipe to make it. I even tell you the best ways to enjoy it, like sprinkling a specific cheese on top or recommending the perfect sauce. Sharing both the food to eat and the complete recipe to make it. That is a Super Sample.
The Silicon Valley Playbook
This Super Sample phenomenon is already a daily reality among developers. In fact, the term GitHub Spirit stems from this very concept.
GitHub is a gathering hub for developers. The GitHub Spirit was born when Silicon Valley geniuses like Elon Musk and Andrej Karpathy decided to open source their personal code diaries for the world to see.
You and I do not need to build an AI agent from scratch anymore. Why? Because the most brilliant developers in the world have already uploaded their agents to GitHub as open source. You can try out what they built, and if you like it, you leave a star rating. The higher the rating, the more of a Super Sample it becomes.
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| How open source is becoming the new standard for everyone |
The critical point here is that this will not stay confined to the developer world. Very soon, every industry, from marketing to product planning, will operate this way.
If any developers are reading this, you are probably thinking, what is so surprising about this? For you, sharing everything and working with open source is just daily life. You inherently understand what copying instead of learning means. But the general public, unfamiliar with this culture, stays cautious, asking, isn't copying a bad thing, and stubbornly clings to old methods.
I have an acquaintance who works as a product planner. His most frequent worry was always, "If I upload this idea, won't someone copy it?" This sensitivity is especially high in education, where intellectual property is treated as personal wealth. In that world, someone stealing your content causes an absolute uproar.
But honestly, that is a worry suited for a time when only humans lived on Earth. In this world coexisting with AI, everything, whether it is content, marketing, or coding, will transition to the Super Sample model and the GitHub Spirit.
Why Geniuses Share Everything
This brings up an obvious question. Geniuses like Elon Musk and Andrej Karpathy are not fools. So why do they share their precious work?
Because they know exactly how to lead a market when the old structures collapse. It is the strategy of becoming the global standard.
If I open up my recipe, my development source, and people genuinely like it, what happens if every developer around the world starts using my code? From that moment on, my source becomes the global standard. So how many Super Samples a company possesses ends up dictating its future competitiveness.
GitHub has a feature called Issues. Simply put, it is a place where you share all the embarrassing failures from your code diary that you usually would not want anyone to see. Most people only want to showcase their polished, finished products. They feel ashamed revealing the messy footprints of how many failures it took to get there.
But something powerful happens when you share those struggles. By simply sharing your process, you trigger evolution.
The people who were merely following you pick up a Fork and become active participants, chiming in with their own ideas. In that instant, the collective intelligence of countless people merges to solve your problems and evolve your work.
This is exactly why they share their precious recipes. Sharing is evolution. People assume these developers are giving things away for free, but in reality, they are getting their own work upgraded for free. That is why Silicon Valley geniuses open up all their code.
Trust Is the New Skill
Here is the most crucial part. While the reasons above are valid, the ultimate reason for opening up code is this. Trust is now more important than skill.
AI already has the skill, so you no longer need to exhaust yourself building it from scratch. But convincing others to trust that high level skill is something AI cannot do. That is a job only you can do.
Years ago, Elon Musk received offers from companies asking for his electric vehicle patents. His response was to tell them to take them and use them freely. Musk wasn't being foolish. He knew he could not grow the EV industry all by himself.
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| Why trusting your competitors creates a bigger market for everyone |
If Musk had hoarded those patents, Tesla might have cornered a tiny slice of the market, but the industry itself never would have advanced, and electric cars would not be as popular as they are today.
In the past, competitors were viewed strictly as enemies to fight. Now you have to view them as co-inhabitants of the same market. We are no longer in an era where you show off your individual skills. What matters now is how many people are walking alongside you.
The more people copy your work and build something better from it, the higher your credibility climbs. The number of people who have copied you literally becomes your trust score.
From Followers to Forks
To make this happen, GitHub has a feature called Fork. Literally, it means using a fork to pick something up. If someone clicks the Fork button, they can take the source code you created and build on top of it exactly as it is.
In the past, that would have been considered unethical and bad manners. Today, having your work copied extensively means people trust you. The Fork feature exists precisely so people can copy your work faster.
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| Handing your followers a fork to taste and evolve your creations together |
In the influencer era, followers were the customers. In the Super Sample era, your customers are not followers, they are Forks.
There is a massive difference here. Previously, all followers could do was consume products or watch the influencer from the sidelines. The invention of the Fork turned those spectators into active participants. In a word, you handed a fork to your followers. Now, anytime and anywhere, followers can easily access, taste, and experience the thoughts and creations we produce. And as AI advances, this will only accelerate.
Selling the Process
Since we talked about Forks, let me explain Commits.
Imagine you are a highly famous author. There is a person who has read only one of your books, and another person who has read 100 of your books. If you were selling your next upcoming book for $500, who do you think would buy it?
Naturally, the person who read 100 books is the far more likely buyer. This might sound obvious, but it carries real significance. Why? Because the person who read 100 of your books isn't just interested in the final publication. They want to buy the evolution of your thinking between the May edition and the June edition.
This is exactly what the Commit feature on GitHub represents. It is a function that shows not just the finished product, but the exact history of how you changed your mind and developed your ideas along the way.
Let me share a personal story. I once went on a working holiday in Japan. It wasn't simply because I liked the country, but because I was deeply moved after reading a book by the Japanese entrepreneur Muneaki Masuda. I was just intensely curious.
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| True value lies in the raw notes of failure and evolution |
When you read his books, you only see the finalized text. But what I truly wanted was the thought notebook sitting on his desk. I wanted to know how a simple video store owner transformed his business into a nationwide franchise, how he created the T Card to connect payments, and how that eventually led to a massive real estate business. I was desperately curious about his notes of change throughout that entire journey.
In short, I didn't want his book. I wanted the scribbled memo pad from his workspace.
What I am trying to say is that what we truly need isn't a single polished book. What we need are the notes in between. How that person clicked Commit, how their mindset shifted, what competitors they faced, when they cried over failures. Aren't those raw notes far more valuable than the finished product?
When you commit every single trial, error, and revision from start to finish, you are essentially preparing a meal so that the people holding the Forks can eat it effortlessly. You make it incredibly easy for people to follow in your footsteps.
Imagine you committed every step of your process, over and over, and your fanbase grew by watching that journey. Will those people just stop at copying you? No. The people who copied your process will start making their own unique commits along the way. When that happens, everyone, including you, becomes part of an evolving collective.
At that exact moment, you realize what you were actually selling wasn't your skill, but your trust. And the finished product born from that trust is the Super Sample.
So far, I have only applied the Super Sample concept to the development world, but soon we will see Super Samples emerge across every single industry. The resistance to this shift, however, will be enormous.
Which Side Are You On?
You might be wondering how to actually put this into practice. People will end up split into two distinct groups.
There will be those who write their own diaries and become a Super Sample, and there will be those who fork other people's diaries.
If your goal is to write your own diary and become a Super Sample, you only need to keep one thought in mind. Anyone is allowed to copy me. You have to constantly ask yourself, how can I make this even easier for people to copy?
You must adopt the mindset of, this was my entire process, you can copy all of it, take it. Only when you make this mental shift can you move to the next level. Thinking, I will only share this once it is perfectly finished, is the most foolish mindset you can have.
On the flip side, if you are the one using the fork, you must remember the proper way to copy. Copying is fundamentally different from downloading.
When you download a file, no one knows who downloaded it. But a Fork leaves a record. It means you have to start practicing the habit of clearly stating your sources and acknowledging who you copied from. And the truly beautiful thing about GitHub is this. If you copy my work and build something even better, I, the original creator, can turn around and copy your work too.
We are no longer in an era of pure competition. It is a world of collective creation. Copying from each other to build something greater is the new ideal.
For this to work, you have to stop being ashamed of copying and start taking pride in it. Only when you honestly declare, this is how I am studying, or I learned this from this person, can your recreated work become a true masterpiece.
So I ask you, are you standing on the side of creating Super Samples, or are you on the side of copying them?
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