Don't fall in love with the code you wrote to do the work you did there. It's part of the process. Someone will have to maintain it well after you're gone.
But I don't have anything in the contract about sharing my self-improvement skills and I consider my AI framework (cursor commands I created to not repeat myself, claude/cursor skills, system prompts - everything what makes me to generate code fast) as an acceleration of my work as developer.
If I leave without sharing this, company will continue develop the code I created/generated.
If I share this, I am losing my only handicap in the AI-era: they could take my A framework and the next developer will just type `/fix-issue gh 1243` and have the same result as I do have now.
The `/fix-issue` command is something I created months ago, and I am constantly improving so at this point the first, at most third, result is the code which goes through code review with suggestion-level insights and QA team can't find any bug.
I am not exaggerating. That command is really complex and loads plenty of skills (also mine) and md files (still mine, kept out of the repo) - in total it is like ~12 A4 pages text (I actually counted it now). This is basically my coding approach ported into AI.
I am more surprised why people are sharing this without thinking.
I am now independent contractor and parts are created on company A time, other parts on company B time and different parts at my own time. And so on, and so on. And you can't tell which one is which. For the new company I start as contractor I come with my AI framework, and I am adjusting it on daily basis. What then?
I am now hired by many companies because they know giving me task means it will be done in a day, not a week, and they know it is because I know "how to AI". (I am not perfect, but I work with other guys and I am surprised how inefficient they are when it comes to AI, but this is a different story)
Discussing this seems useless.
In terms of legal, f* no, I am not going to consider my tool adjustments as part of companies properties :)
We can discuss but I will stand my ground: my AI skills - even written on a disc - belongs to me. Same, if I go to car paint garage to have my paint fixed I am not expecting the painter will reveal his method to get the perfect color or give me his notes where he self-described "how to paint".
Before "AI era" we all had our own system scripts, manually crafted in bash/python, to make repeating task automated. And then it was never a question to share it: the scripts are the way how I configure/tune my computer and how I get advantage over other developers. The .cloude/.cursor directory is the same.
No, you're not. Company time + company resources = company property. Company project = company property. No code within any given company belongs to one person, but belongs to (spoiler alert!) the company.
If you want to develop voodoo to make you irreplaceable, do it in the context of your own projects, with your own resources, on your own time.
PS: there may well be legal reason that they require the prompts. e.g. to ensure that you're not injecting materials owned by someone else. They are perfectly justified in demanding access to every byte which goes into their software, documents, infrastructure, etc.