Written about it here before: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual...
It isn’t something I care very much about, except when it’s used as a certificate of achievement. I almost never do literature searches with an attempt to dedupe. I only ever do it to see if someone has explored something better than I have. That’s often the case but other times it is not.
I agree that there will be cases where you implement tricks that others have had before you, without knowing. A few years ago, I had a delightful idea, experimented and wrote it up. One commenter directed me to a post that described it as "folk knowledge". There will be other cases where you encountered an idea before, but didn't remember it.
Still, crediting what you can easily know you cited is good. Even aside from credit, comparisons to existing systems are part of how we understand what a system does.
The first step in approaching anything difficult is seeing whether someone else has already solved it.
That's how the knowledge that it was a facsimile was lost.
- https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...
- https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude