They rebuilt Kibu's site by copying Mintlify pixel by pixel
Ben Wallace's principle: find the best work, recreate 100% of it, then sprinkle in your own 3%. He cops to copying Mintlify's 2025 site for Kibu. The thread split on the word "steal."
The honesty is the hook: the 3% wasn't rigid. In practice it crept to roughly 50% once the team trusted its own instincts, swapping in team photos on buttons and favoring video over screenshots.
The thread's reversal is that this isn't stealing at all. Stealing means taking the idea and remixing it, several argue; copying the finished output line-by-line just manufactures sameness. One twist nobody resolved: Mintlify's 2025 look was itself lifted off Stripe.
A principle named "steal," demonstrated on a real site
Ben Wallace's post is a confession dressed as advice. He and a coworker, Justin, rebuilt the marketing site for Kibu by copying Mintlify's 2025 design pixel by pixel: the striking top section, the colour choices, the minimalist components. The method is the argument. Find work that's already excellent, recreate the full 100% to understand every decision, then add your own 3%, a figure he borrows from designer Virgil Abloh. His framing for why this is legitimate rather than lazy:
"The truth is that you're rewarded for identifying and solving problems efficiently. And odds are, smarter people before you have already done both."
The twist he admits to: the 3% wasn't a rule. As confidence grew it ballooned to about 50%, until the copy had drifted into its own thing.
The thread's quarrel was with the noun, not the act
Most commenters accepted learning-by-recreation and rejected the label. The cleanest correction drew a line through the title:
"This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output." — a commenter redefining the term
Others warned the pixel-perfect version backfires as a signal of quality:
"If I see you doing this, I immediately lose trust in your product and will immediately leave." — a commenter on what copying signals to users
The craft defense leaned on an old writing exercise:
"Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work… an extraordinary way to see how the greats work." — a commenter invoking copywork
Then the recursion that punctures the whole moral debate:
"Mintlify 'stole' their latest design off Stripe. It's very obvious." — a commenter who traces the lineage one step further
Which is the part the post doesn't reckon with: if the source you copied was itself a copy, the question stops being whether stealing is a skill and becomes whether originality was ever on the table in marketing design at all.
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