How about stuff like how you set up your automated tests, or the Python project folder structure, or that you always first test the road sign recognition on self driving cars before testing something else. Or you first pretrain your neural nets of lane detection before jointly training for road signs and lanes.

I mean you remember the code you wrote and when faced with a similar case you will solve it in a similar way. The above are just really silly simplified examples for it.

That's the point I was trying to make. You can't really 'catch' someone using the same logic to write similar code.

If I change companies, I am going to write code in the same way and test it in the same way.

It'll be very difficult for my original company to 'sue' me if I were to code for the other company unless I do something like this guy did.