system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
After you leave a company, where is line between your code, their code, and code that was heavily inspired by your time at the company?

If you leave a job without signing an NDA, or noncompete, where is the line between the code you wrote for them, and starting a new project that was very similar?

If you wrote tools to scrape websites for a company, would you be getting into hot water if you started writing new code that scraped websites?

At first glance, it would seem egregious that the company could stop you from working on something vaguely defined as "similiar" but at the same time, there must be common sense protections for companies, no?
gpt
The line is very clear.  If you are an employee of the company and made it on their time then they own the code 100% and you taking a copy is theft or intellectual property.

You can go off on your own and produce a competing product just fine, but you better be sure you they can't come after you for theft of the code, patent infringement or some other form of trade secret they may own in some respect.