Vibe Coding and the Limits of Copyright

AI now writes the code. Anyone with an idea and a prompt can build an app.

But code an AI wrote is hard to own, and the real costs move downstream — where Portugal and the Greater Bay Area part ways.

While AI democratises the writing of code, only supportive ecosystems and adaptable IP rules can democratise the building of a livelihood.

Vibe coding lets anyone build software by describing it in plain language. In April 2026, Google said 75% of its new code was AI-generated.

Software-as-a-Service companies lost around $300 billion in market value within 48 hours: the “SaaSpocalypse”.

But the cost did not disappear — it moved downstream. Prototypes come up to 26% faster, yet delivery is 19% slower, driven by a 441% jump in code-review time.

In Portugal, code an AI wrote has no human author, so no copyright: purely vibe-coded software falls into the public domain. Functionality can be copied, the interface protects only the surface, and consumer AI plans undermine trade secrets.

Add copyleft licences, Cyber Resilience Act SBOMs and one-sided platform terms, and the solo founder is left in precarious self-employment.

Shenzhen subsidises exactly those downstream costs: compute, model and data vouchers, half-day registration and shared compliance services.

The national registry still refuses AI core code — but in Hong Kong, s.11(3) makes the person who made the arrangements necessary the author, for 50 years.

Three fixes: a compliance sandbox and free SBOM scanner for Portugal; an AI-assisted registration track at the CPCC; a cross-border GBA OPC IP guide.

While AI democratises the writing of code, only supportive ecosystems and adaptable IP rules can democratise the building of a livelihood.

1Introduction

Vibe coding is the use of AI, prompted in natural language, to write computer code — a term attributed to Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year. In April 2026, Google said “75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated”.

Financial analysts called it the “SaaSpocalypse”.

−$300 billion in market value, within 48 hours.

Yet there is a productivity paradox. AI tools speed up prototypes by up to 26%, but final delivery is 19% slower, driven by a 441% jump in code-review time and growing technical debt. Building a prototype is cheaper than ever; verifying, securing and maintaining a commercial product is not.

So: can vibe coding help people without coding skills or capital climb the social ladder — and do the IP rules and ecosystems of Portugal and the Greater Bay Area help or hold them back?

2Portugal

Portugal has 5,091 active start-ups, but youth unemployment stands at 20.22% and nearly 30% of young Portuguese citizens live abroad. Graduates are pushed toward necessity self-employment — and when a vibe-coded app hits the debugging wall, local developers are scarce: tech job vacancy tightness is 288% above the OECD average.

A computer program is protected only if it is the author’s own intellectual creation: a human making ‘free and creative choices’ (Infopaq). When the AI makes the syntactic choices, purely vibe-coded software lacks human authorship and falls into the public domain. Google can claim the overall compilation; a solo founder cannot stop copying, grant exclusive licences or pass investor due diligence.

The workarounds are partial.

Functionality cannot be copyrighted (SAS Institute): competitors may observe, study and test a vibe coder’s platform to replicate its exact functional workflows.

An interface can be protected if it reflects creative choices (BSA, Cofemel) — but competitors can easily alter the layout while copying the tool.

Trade secrets require ‘reasonable steps’ to keep information confidential — undermined when founders use standard consumer AI coding plans that log user prompts and code for model training.

Downstream, AI models output open-source code without its licence notice; one copyleft snippet can force the whole product open. The Cyber Resilience Act demands SBOMs. Platform terms deny indemnity, shift liability to the user and permit sudden API price hikes.

In Portugal, these combined hurdles limit vibe coding to precarious self-employment rather than scalable social mobility.

Same coder. Same app. A different system.

3The Greater Bay Area

Nine Guangdong cities plus Hong Kong and Macao: 86 million people, three legal jurisdictions, and R&D spending from 6.7% of GDP in Shenzhen to 0.31% in Macao.

Shenzhen’s 2026–2027 OPC Action Plan is built for the ‘super individual’ (超级个体): one founder whose AI agents handle coding, design and operations.

And it pays for exactly the downstream costs: up to RMB 10 million in Computing Power Vouchers (训力券), RMB 2 million in Model Vouchers (模型券) and RMB 2 million in Corpus Vouchers (语料券) — plus half-day registration and a shared open-source compliance platform.

Courts are flexible on AI art: in Li v Liu the Beijing Internet Court granted copyright to an AI image because 150+ prompts reflected human intellectual achievement.

But the CPCC’s 2026 rules bar registration of software with AI-generated core functions. The paradox: the city gives them vouchers to code with AI, but the national registry refuses to register pure AI core code.

Two ways out. Shenzhen courts strongly protect source code as a trade secret — and subsidised local models keep it in-house.

And Hong Kong: under Section 11(3) of Cap 528, a computer-generated work’s author is ‘the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken’ — for 50 years.

4Comparison

Prototyping is equally accessible in Lisbon and Shenzhen. Stage 2 — legal and commercial capability — diverges sharply.

Five structural factors explain the divergence: the rules (droit d’auteur vs. Hong Kong’s common law), the practice (upfront EU compliance vs. Shenzhen’s industrial policy), the interests, the history, and the world outside.

5Policy

Portugal & the EU: A two-year compliance sandbox for micro-enterprises under €2 million turnover, and a free public scanner that checks AI code for copyleft licences and generates SBOMs.

NCAC & CPCC: An “AI-Assisted Software Registration Track”, where founders declare the AI tools and prompts used and register their human-designed architecture, workflow and interface.

Shenzhen & Hong Kong: A cross-border ‘GBA OPC IP Guide’ through Qianhai, with templates for holding computer-generated software copyright in Hong Kong under s.11(3).

6Conclusion

Vibe coding clearly democratises software prototyping, but cheaper code does not automatically yield sustainable businesses. The bottlenecks shift downstream — to verification and IP compliance — and there, IP frameworks and ecosystems make the decisive difference. While AI democratises the writing of code, only supportive ecosystems and adaptable IP rules can democratise the building of a livelihood.

Abstract

Shenzhen’s 2026–2027 plan for AI “one-person companies” presents AI-enabled entrepreneurship as a route to innovation and commercialisation. Can vibe coding democratise access to the digital economy, enabling people without formal programming skills or substantial start-up capital to build products, create livelihoods and open new paths to social mobility? This potential also raises important IP challenges: beyond copyright ownership, how do code provenance, third-party code and open-source licences, API dependencies, trade secrets and AI platform terms affect the ability to commercialise and scale AI-generated software? Through a comparison of the GBA and Portugal, this paper will examine whether IP frameworks and entrepreneurial ecosystems can enable this new form of business creation while widening access to economic opportunity.

Keywords: Vibe coding; AI-generated software copyright; Social mobility; One-person companies (OPC); Greater Bay Area

1Introduction

Vibe coding is the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code, a term attributed to the former Director of AI at Tesla and founding engineer at OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, in his post on X on 2 February 2025.¹ Software creation is thus accessible to anyone with an idea and a prompt, regardless of formal coding skills, earning the term Collins Dictionary Word of the Year for 2025.² The disruption extends deep into enterprise markets: in April 2026, Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, stated that “75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall”.³ A parallel race is unfolding in the Greater Bay Area, where Chinese tech giant Tencent is actively building and integrating its own Hunyuan-powered AI coding model into its development workflows.⁴ Concurrently, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies lost around $300 billion in market value within 48 hours, prompting financial analysts to dub the phenomenon the “SaaSpocalypse”.⁵

Financial analysts called it the “SaaSpocalypse”.

−$300 billion in market value, within 48 hours.

Yet empirical studies reveal a clear productivity paradox. While AI coding tools speed up initial prototype completion by up to 26%, real-world repository studies show a 19% overall slowdown in final delivery, driven by a 441% jump in code-review time and growing technical debt.⁶ Vibe-coded software often lacks clean architecture, introducing security flaws and hallucinated software packages that non-technical creators cannot easily fix. Building an initial prototype is cheaper than ever, but verifying, securing, and maintaining a commercial product remains costly.

Given this shift, it is necessary to examine whether natural-language software generation can help individuals climb the social ladder, and how specific jurisdictions support this emerging market. Notably, Shenzhen’s 2026–2027 plan for AI “one-person companies” (OPCs) promotes AI-enabled solo entrepreneurship as a route to commercialisation.⁷ However, this potential raises major intellectual property (IP) challenges: beyond copyright ownership, where courts consistently require human authorship,⁸ how do code provenance, third-party open-source licences, API dependencies, trade secrets, and AI platform terms affect the ability to commercialise and scale AI-generated software?⁹ Accordingly, this paper asks: Can vibe coding democratise access to the digital economy for individuals without formal programming qualifications or substantial capital, and how do IP frameworks and entrepreneurial ecosystems in Portugal and the Greater Bay Area (GBA) facilitate or constrain this process? Section 2 examines Portugal as the home jurisdiction; Section 3 analyses the GBA; Section 4 compares both systems; Section 5 offers policy recommendations; and Section 6 concludes.

2Portugal

2.1Macroeconomic Context: Necessity, Entrepreneurship and Tech Talent

Evaluating whether vibe coding can drive social mobility in Portugal requires situating the solo founder within the national ecosystem and EU single market. By 2025, Portugal surpassed its national target with 5,091 active start-ups generating €2.86 billion in turnover and €0.6 billion in venture capital.¹⁰ However, structural macroeconomic hurdles persist. In 2025, Portugal’s youth unemployment rate (aged 15–24) stood at 20.22%, fuelling a severe brain drain where nearly 30% of young Portuguese citizens live abroad.¹¹ Meanwhile, R&D expenditure sits at 1.69% of GDP, reflecting moderate innovation intensity.¹²

Economic studies distinguish between “opportunity entrepreneurship” – scalable ventures backed by capital – and “necessity entrepreneurship”, where people turn to self-employment because regular jobs are scarce. In Portugal, youth unemployment pushes non-technical graduates toward necessity self-employment, making vibe coding an appealing way to build digital products without start-up capital. However, turning an AI prototype into a reliable commercial product requires human engineering verification, colliding with Portugal’s severe shortage of ICT specialists: tech job vacancy tightness is 288% higher than the OECD average as local programmers are hired remotely by Northern European firms. When a vibe-coded app hits the 441% surge in debugging time,¹³ hiring local developers is prohibitively expensive for low-capital founders.

2.2Copyright Ownership: Human Authorship and the Public Domain Problem

Portuguese vibe coders also face a direct IP hurdle: the lack of copyright over AI-generated code. In Portugal, software copyright is governed by Decree-Law No. 252/94 (transposing the EU Software Directive 2009/24/EC) and the Code of Copyright and Related Rights (CDADC).¹⁴ Under Article 1(3) of Directive 2009/24/EC and Article 1(2) of Decree-Law No. 252/94, a computer program is protected only if it is the “author’s own intellectual creation”. In Infopaq (Case C-5/08), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) established that this requires a human author to make ‘free and creative choices’ that leave a personal touch.¹⁵ Portuguese courts (Supremo Tribunal de Justiça and Tribunal da Relação) apply this standard, requiring genuine human intellectual effort for copyright, though no Portuguese case has yet directly ruled on AI-generated software.¹⁶

This matches the international consensus that machine outputs cannot be copyrighted without substantial human intervention. When a vibe coder prompts an AI to generate code without manually editing the syntax, the human only supplies the general idea—which is excluded from protection under Article 1(2) of Directive 2009/24/EC. Because the AI model makes the syntactic choices, purely vibe-coded software lacks human authorship and falls into the public domain.¹⁷

What happens, then, to large companies like Google where 75% of new code is AI-generated, and how does that differ from solo vibe coders? Large tech firms might be more protected because their human engineers review, modify, and integrate AI code into massive existing codebases, allowing the company to claim copyright over the overall software compilation as a collective work under Article 3(2) of Decree-Law No. 252/94,¹⁸ backed by private cloud servers and strong market scale. Conversely, for a solo founder whose app is entirely AI-generated, lacking copyright is fatal: they cannot prevent code copying, grant valid exclusive licences, or pass investor IP due diligence.

2.3Can Vibe Coders Protect Platform Appearance or Functionality Instead?

Without source-code copyright, can vibe coders rely on alternative IP rights covering functionality, Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), or trade secrets? EU and Portuguese case law shows these workarounds offer only partial protection:

First, software functionality cannot be copyrighted. In SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Ltd (C-406/10), the CJEU held that neither the functionality of a computer program, nor its programming language or data file formats, constitute protectable expression under Directive 2009/24/EC, as monopolising functionality would amount to patenting ideas. Under SAS Institute and Article 6(1)(b) of Decree-Law No. 252/94, competitors may legally observe, study, and test a vibe coder’s platform to replicate its exact functional workflows.¹⁹

Second, protecting the visual appearance or GUI is possible, but only covers surface design. In BSA (Case C-393/09), the CJEU ruled that a GUI is not covered by the Software Directive, but can be protected as an independent work under the InfoSoc Directive (2001/29/EC) if it reflects the author’s own creative choices. Similarly, in Cofemel v G-Star Raw (Case C-683/17, referred from Portugal), the CJEU confirmed that designs qualify for copyright if they reflect free and creative human choices.²⁰ While founders who manually design or register a custom interface can stop visual clones, competitors can easily alter the layout while copying the underlying tool.

Third, SaaS founders can try to protect backend code as a trade secret under the EU Trade Secrets Directive (2016/943), transposed into the Portuguese Industrial Property Code. Yet trade secret protection requires ‘reasonable steps’ to keep information confidential, which is undermined when solo founders use standard consumer AI coding plans that log user prompts and code for model training.²¹

2.4Beyond Authorship: Provenance, Copyleft, APIs, and EU Compliance

Commercialising AI software in Portugal also brings four downstream IP and regulatory risks. First, regarding code provenance and open-source licences: AI models often output third-party open-source code without its licence notice. Accidentally including code governed by a strict ‘copyleft’ licence, such as GPLv3 or AGPLv3 (which applies to network SaaS apps), can legally force the founder to make their entire product open-source for free. Second, under the EU Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/2847), commercial software makers must run cybersecurity assessments and maintain Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) listing all dependencies, alongside EU AI Act transparency rules. Non-technical founders rarely have the capital to hire specialists to audit dependencies and compile SBOMs. Third, solo founders rely on AI platform terms that deny copyright indemnity to small users, shift infringement liability onto the user, and permit sudden API price hikes.²² In Portugal, these combined hurdles limit vibe coding to precarious self-employment rather than scalable social mobility.

In Portugal, these combined hurdles limit vibe coding to precarious self-employment rather than scalable social mobility.

Same coder. Same app. A different system.

3The Greater Bay Area

3.1Shenzhen’s 2026–2027 AI ‘One-Person Company’ (OPC) Plan: Motives and Scale

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) handles AI entrepreneurship very differently. Linking nine Mainland Guangdong cities with Hong Kong and Macao, the GBA is a mega-region of 86 million people and a GDP above RMB 14 trillion. Operating under ‘One Country, Two Systems,’ it combines three legal jurisdictions and wide variations in R&D spending: from 6.7% of GDP in Shenzhen to 0.31% in Macao.²³

In January 2026, the Shenzhen Municipal Industry and Information Technology Bureau issued the Action Plan for Building an AI ‘One-Person Company’ (OPC) Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Leading Hub (2026–2027) (深圳市打造人工智能OPC创业生态引领地行动计划).²⁴ The policy motives behind this plan are clear. Whereas software ventures previously required full engineering and operations teams, Shenzhen policymakers recognised that AI agents allow a single founder—a ‘super individual’ (超级个体)—to handle coding, design, and operations without a traditional engineering team. Economically, the OPC plan serves two goals: it creates high-value self-employment for university graduates and returning talent as big tech hiring slows, and it drives commercial adoption of domestic AI models across Shenzhen’s hardware and cross-border e-commerce industries.

The Action Plan sets concrete statistical targets for the end of 2027: building over 10 specialised OPC communities (exceeding 500,000 m² of workspace), nurturing over 1,000 high-growth AI OPCs, and attracting 10,000 AI innovation talents. Crucially, Shenzhen subsidises the exact downstream costs that solo founders struggle with, using the ‘Three Vouchers’ (三券) tool: eligible projects can receive up to RMB 10 million in ‘Computing Power Vouchers’ (训力券) for cloud compute, up to RMB 2 million in ‘Model Vouchers’ (模型券) for AI APIs, and up to RMB 2 million in ‘Corpus Vouchers’ (语料券) for legally cleared datasets. District-level programmes add practical support: Nanshan District’s ‘Model Camp’ (模力营) offers half-day company registration and seven public service platforms, including a dedicated open-source and compliance platform, while Longgang District offers up to RMB 10 million in seed equity, RMB 10,000 cash grants for recent graduates and HK/Macao residents, up to three years of rent-free 3m² workstations, and one year of rent-free housing. Local hubs like the OPC Companion Community further connect vibe coders through in-person events and WeChat networks.²⁵

3.2Mainland China’s Copyright Rules and the 2026 CPCC Registration Restriction

Within Mainland Guangdong, however, solo founders face a sharp tension between flexible court rulings on AI art and strict administrative rules on software registration. In visual art cases like Li v Liu (2023), the Beijing Internet Court granted copyright to an AI-generated image because the user’s 150+ prompts and parameter choices reflected human intellectual achievements, building on earlier reasoning from the Shenzhen Nanshan District People’s Court in Tencent v Yingxun (2019).²⁶

For software, though, administrative rules tightened in 2026. In Mainland China, a Software Copyright Registration Certificate from the China Copyright Protection Centre (CPCC) is essential for ‘High-Tech Enterprise’ tax breaks, grants, and app-store listings. After national software registrations reached 3.18 million in 2025 (\~330,000 in Guangdong)—partly inflated by AI-generated shell apps claiming subsidies—the CPCC introduced strict 2026 rules barring registration for software with AI-generated core functions.²⁷ Applicants must now submit detailed manual architecture descriptions, provide verified code, and sign a declaration confirming AI was not used for core logic. This creates a paradox for Shenzhen vibe coders: the city gives them vouchers to code with AI, but the national registry refuses to register pure AI core code.

3.3Trade Secrets in Shenzhen and the Hong Kong SAR Legal Bridge

The GBA ecosystem helps founders overcome this hurdle in two ways. First, in Mainland Guangdong, Shenzhen courts strongly protect software source code, algorithms, and business data as trade secrets under Article 9 and unfair competition rules under Article 2 of the PRC Anti-Unfair Competition Law (AUCL), while local hubs like Nanshan’s Model Camp assist OPCs with open-source checks and mandatory algorithm filings.²⁸

Second, founders can use Hong Kong SAR as a legal and financial bridge. With 5,221 start-ups and $638.2 million in venture funding in 2025, Hong Kong operates under common law and explicitly protects ‘computer-generated works’ under Section 11(3) of the Copyright Ordinance (Cap 528). Where a computer program (a literary work under Section 4(1)(b)) has no human author, Section 11(3) grants authorship to ‘the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken’ for 50 years (Section 17(6))—a rule reaffirmed by the Hong Kong Intellectual Property Department.²⁹ A Shenzhen OPC founder can thus build products using municipal compute vouchers while holding statutory copyright through a Hong Kong entity under Cap 528 for global licensing and investment.

4Comparison and Explanation

4.1Side-by-Side Comparison Across the Commercialisation Process

Comparing Portugal and the GBA across three stages—(1) Technical Democratisation, (2) Legal and Commercial Capability, and (3) Economic Conversion—highlights the role of local institutions. While Stage 1 (prototyping) is equally accessible in Lisbon and Shenzhen, Stage 2 diverges sharply:

Copyright Ownership & Alternative IP: In Portugal, EU rules (Infopaq; Decree-Law No. 252/94) seem to deny copyright to pure AI code, and SAS Institute leaves functionality unprotected, leaving founders with narrow GUI protection (BSA, Cofemel). In the GBA, despite Mainland China’s 2026 CPCC ban on AI core code registration, founders can use Hong Kong’s Cap 528 Section 11(3) to secure statutory copyright as the person making the ‘necessary arrangements’;³⁰

Provenance, Open Source & Compliance: Portuguese solo founders must pay out of pocket to audit copyleft licences (GPL/AGPL) and compile mandatory EU Cyber Resilience Act SBOMs in a market where tech developer shortages are 288% above the OECD average. In Shenzhen, OPC hubs like Nanshan’s Model Camp provide shared open-source compliance services and RMB 2 million data vouchers.

APIs, Trade Secrets & Platform Terms: Portuguese founders rely on foreign APIs under standard terms that lack legal indemnity and risk leaking confidential prompts, whereas Shenzhen’s RMB 10 million compute vouchers and local open-weight models let GBA founders run models privately, keeping trade secrets safe.

4.2Explaining the Divergence: Rules, Practice, Interests, History, and the World Outside

Applying the area-studies method,³¹ five structural factors explain why the GBA facilitates economic conversion while Portugal constrains it:

Rules: Portugal follows the European droit d’auteur tradition shaped by the CJEU, which treats copyright as a human personal right and requires human creative choices. The GBA combines Mainland civil law (where registration rules are tightened to stop subsidy fraud) with Hong Kong’s pragmatic common law copyright (Cap 528), which rewards commercial organisation.

Practice: The EU governs tech mainly through strict upfront safety laws (the Cyber Resilience Act and AI Act), creating high compliance costs for solo founders. Shenzhen governs through flexible industrial policy, offering half-day registration, free 3m² desks, and compute vouchers to reduce early friction.

Interests: With R&D at 1.69% of GDP and 20.22% youth unemployment, self-employment in Portugal often acts as an uncoordinated safety valve. In Shenzhen (6.7% R&D/GDP), city authorities actively back 1,000+ AI OPCs to absorb graduates and boost local cloud and hardware demand.

History: Portugal’s start-up scene grew after 2011 mainly around software services without deep manufacturing chains. Shenzhen evolved from a 1980 Special Economic Zone into a top global innovation cluster, as documented by WIPO and observed during our programme’s site visits to Huawei and Tencent and lectures in Shenzhen (October 2026),³² where software innovation connects directly to hardware supply chains, design protection, and enterprise testing.

The World Outside: Portugal enjoys EU single-market access but depends on US cloud platforms. Facing US chip export controls, China and the GBA have invested heavily in domestic compute vouchers and open-weight models while using Hong Kong’s common law system as a bridge to global markets.³³

5Policy Recommendations

To enable vibe coding support real entrepreneurship and social mobility while managing IP risks, three realistic measures are recommended:

European Commission, Startup Portugal, and the Portuguese Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) – Create a Micro-Enterprise Compliance Sandbox and Free SBOM Scanner: EU and Portuguese authorities should introduce a two-year regulatory sandbox exempting solo founders and micro-enterprises (under €2 million turnover) from fines under the EU Cyber Resilience Act. At the same time, Startup Portugal and INPI – following Nanshan’s Model Camp example – should provide a free public scanning tool so non-technical founders can check AI-generated code for copyleft (GPL/AGPL) licences and generate required SBOMs before launch.

National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC) and the China Copyright Protection Centre (CPCC) – Introduce an “AI-Assisted Software Registration Track”: To resolve the clash between Shenzhen’s OPC plan and the CPCC’s 2026 ban on AI core code, the NCAC and CPCC should create a dedicated registration track where OPC founders openly declare the AI tools and prompts used, and register copyright over their human-designed system architecture, workflow selection, and interface integration – aligning software registration with the Beijing Internet Court’s approach in Li v Liu.

For the Shenzhen Market Supervision Administration (IP Bureau) and the Hong Kong Intellectual Property Department (IPD) – Publish a Cross-Border ‘GBA OPC IP Guide’: Through the Qianhai Cooperation Zone, Shenzhen and Hong Kong IP authorities should provide simple legal templates helping Mainland OPC founders register and hold computer-generated software copyright in Hong Kong under Section 11(3) of Cap 528, making it easier to combine Mainland computing support with Hong Kong IP protection when raising investment.

6Conclusion

In direct answer to our research question, vibe coding clearly democratises the technical ability to build software prototypes, allowing people without programming skills or large savings to turn ideas into working apps. Vibe coding clearly democratises software prototyping for non-technical founders with limited capital, yet cheaper code generation does not automatically yield sustainable businesses or upward social mobility. As the cost of generating syntax drops – seen in Google’s 75% AI code figure and the \~$300 billion ‘SaaSpocalypse’ – the real bottlenecks shift downstream to code verification (the 441% jump in review time) and intellectual property compliance.

At this downstream stage, IP frameworks and local ecosystems make the decisive difference. Because pure AI code lacks human authorship under EU and Portuguese law (Infopaq; Decree-Law No. 252/94) and faces 2026 registration bans at Mainland China’s CPCC, vibe coders cannot rely on traditional source-code copyright. While alternative IP routes, such as protecting manually designed interfaces (BSA, Cofemel) or keeping backend code as a trade secret, offer partial workarounds, they do not protect software functionality under SAS Institute and do not shield solo founders from open-source copyleft contamination, EU Cyber Resilience Act compliance costs, or one-sided AI platform terms. Consequently, in Portugal, where high youth unemployment (20.22%) meets severe tech talent shortages (288% above the OECD average) and unsubsidised compliance costs, vibe coding risks leaving solo founders in precarious self-employment. By contrast, the GBA, combining Shenzhen’s 2026–2027 OPC Action Plan (RMB 10 million computing vouchers and shared compliance services) with Hong Kong’s protection for computer-generated works under Cap 528 Section 11(3), provides an institutional environment capable of turning technical access into real economic opportunity.

Two limits of this study should be noted: first, because vibe coding only recently emerged and both Shenzhen’s OPC plan and the CPCC rules began in early 2026, long-term data on business survival and household income mobility are not yet available; second, comparing an EU country with a mega-region like the GBA involves scale differences, addressed here by comparing how rules and institutions work in practice. Ultimately, while AI democratises the writing of code, only supportive ecosystems and adaptable IP rules can democratise the building of a livelihood.