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On February 6, 2026, the Federal Circuit affirmed summary judgment of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for all asserted claims across six patents in Innovaport LLC v. Target Corp., No. 24-1545 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 6, 2026) (nonprecedential). The patents claimed systems and methods for providing product location information within a retail store: receiving a customer’s query, searching a database containing product locations and related information, and returning results that included cross-referenced product suggestions. The court found the claims directed to the abstract idea of “collecting, analyzing, retrieving, and displaying information” at Alice step one, then concluded at step two that the additional elements added no “inventive concept.” 

A practical way to refill it: inventions.md and fast (detailed!) provisional filings. 

In brief: 

Agentic coding collapses the time and capital advantages that used to protect early-stage software companies. When competitors can reach feature parity in days, “shipping faster” stops being a moat and becomes table stakes. 

One of the few levers you can pull early is intellectual property, but only if you capture inventions while you build. 

The simplest workflow I’ve found: instruct your coding agent to surface patentable technical ideas and log them in an inventions.md file, then file provisional patent applications quickly on the ideas that survive a rough patentability screen.

As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I was captivated by the emerging world of home computers. I had a TI-99/4A first and later upgraded to a Commodore 64.  I spent countless hours as a child writing programs in BASIC, trying to make these first home computers do various things, and absorbed in the possibilities they represented.  In reflecting on the evolution of computers over the decades since those childhood experiences, I’ve come to the realization that one of the major exponential advances in computer technology for users was when home computers became widely available.  That was the biggest change in our lives that came from computers and, in my view, far more transformative than any of the incremental improvements that followed.