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Trade Secrets When Reverse Engineering Gets Cheap In a recent piece I argued that agentic coding is draining your moat. When a capable team with the right tools can reach feature parity in days, the advantage of shipping first stops being defensible and becomes table stakes. That argument has a companion. Many companies, having watched […]

A Few Thoughts on Patent Prosecution in 5, 10, and 15 Years, for In-House and Outside Counsel  At a recent conference I attended, a panel was asked what patent prosecution might look like in five, ten, and fifteen years, for both in-house and outside counsel. I have some thoughts. Predictions in this area should be […]

Enterprise-Grade Security: ARTY’s Confidentiality Architecture Patent professionals trust ARTY with some of the most sensitive intellectual property in the world: unpublished inventions, prosecution strategy, and attorney-client communications. Security is not a feature ARTY ships with. It is part of how ARTY was designed. This is the second article in a four-part series on ARTY. Last […]

Built-In Quality Assurance: How ARTY Validates Patent Applications at Every Stage ARTY, the proprietary platform shipping out of SLW Labs, is built around a single principle: quality checks should not happen at the end of a process, they should happen throughout that process. This is the first article in a four-part series on ARTY. Two […]

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 Cir. Feb. 6, 2026) (nonprecedential).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.