Mea Culpa – Dark Hours (blog.terrygodier.com)

Kudos to the author for taking responsibility and doing the ethical thing here.

Yeah, the big bad AI made you plagiarize a whole project down to the name, and lie to everyone about the review process. Not buying any of it.

> I’d like to give credit where credit is due.

... but I'm not going to insert a link to his project - https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours

Something went seriously wrong there, and I'm not sure it's just Claude copying an existing project bug-for-bug. For more context, see also this post from Gruber at Daring Fireball:

https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...

On the previous HN posts I got this impression:

The developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps.

He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app "Dark Hours", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app

The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote an article claiming Apple's reviewers confuse a nice, scientific astronomy app with astrology. The developer reviewed the article before publication.

It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...

Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.

I am not buying it.

I love the attitude. Period. And I also understand his personal decision to not use it to create mobile apps, as mentioned. But, I would not follow the same route. There are several open source projects, and just because models were trained with their code, it shouldn’t stop me of creating something similar/better, with my “taste” (from another post this week) in mind. We are all different. We should have different options. I fully support open-source, but I support way more the creativity and idea from individuals that can generate something new.

I'll give him credit for taking responsibility, but I have to admit that Claude had nothing to do with the issue. You could have taken somebody else's project with a few uses of curl and git. There may be many things wrong with Claude or even AI in general, but this isn't one of them.

Since the other app is also heavily vibe-coded, it wouldn't make sense to kill your own, so I guess in reality this is questionable?

> While I had genuinely never seen DarkHours.app before yesterday

If only there were a way to share your own commits resulting from your own Claude sessions to verify whether it's true...

I posted this post to HN after seeing someone else link it in a recent thread, and I'll repeat what I said there:

I find this synopsis very hard to believe, seems he's shifting blame onto an LLM instead of taking responsibility for his actions. He said he'd significantly alter the feature set, so why didn't that happen? That's a single prompt to Claude. He more than likely just told the LLM to clone the repo and ship it as is, not actually working on it in any capacity. In that case it wasn't the AI "reproducing" a bug as there was no reproduction in the first place.

The bigger issue here is that he mislead (I think lied to, personally) John Gruber to the point that Gruber had to issue his first retraction in 25 years: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...

Fun and useful PR jargon to describe what this post smells like: a “limited hangout”.

(a damage-control strategy where an organization or individual admits to a portion of a secret or scandal after a cover story fails, while still hiding the most damaging key facts.)

So the thing that drove this person to Gruber et al's notice is an RSS Reader that doesn't count how many new items are pending? It's the kind of thing that can get you significant mindshare among the last few people who use RSS readers and have disproportionate impact on the discourse apparently

The author's alleged misdeeds aside, even before AI, there were lots of small projects that were similar to one another.

I don't think that's a bad thing, or that it's necessarily plagiarism - unless the LLM spews out the other project's code from its training...

I'm happy to see multiple takes on the same idea. There are lots of tiny aesthetic and functional decisions that make apps different from one another. Now that implementation is cheaper we should celebrate that.

It is simply amazing that the "the AI ate my homework" routine works on anyone. Like, a single person out there actually falls for this hilarious nonsense?

The AI eating his homework wasn't even the worst of it, and this whole debacle is just a series of poor decisions and deceptions. Bizarre. Yet there are comments in here praising his "attitude". Can I interest you fine folks in the Brooklyn Bridge? I'm selling it for 40% off, today only. Message me.

I’d love to see the other repo, and the prompts that led to both.

Did Godier copy the other guy’s repo, name and all, and try to pass it off as his own work? That seems like the obvious conclusion, albeit brazen to the point of insanity.

Did Claude copy the repo, in response to a prompt? If Claude copies a Claude vibe-coded project, can any plagiarism really be said to have taken place?

Or is this just what Claude is statistically likely to spit out if you prompt it to build an astronomy app and leave it to it?

Great breakdown

> Going forward, I won’t be using AI in this way to create any more web stuff, and I do not use it to anything close to this extent on iOS software

That's a terrible lesson.

It's an open source app. Tell you agent to fork it an contribute to it if you have any ideas that might improve it.

You don't want to build castles anymore if you don't own the whole sandbox?

If you needed another reason to hate low effort vibe coding…

“It became clear to me that the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed.”

At what point do we confront the reality that premier AI models are blatant copyright violation machines through and through?

The thing that stands out to me with all of this is how little accountability there is left within the field.

Published a rip-off? "Sorry, Claude must have done this".

Published a shitty/wrong/insensitive/<insert other adjectives here> post somewhere? "Sorry, the AI wrote it"

Regardless of how we view LLMs as a whole, if you produce content with AI and publish it, you personally own every line of what you published. "Claude did it" cannot ever be a valid excuse.

So Claude spit out similar code in response to similar prompts? Did Claude also suggest the same name twice?

This current story is likely just the latest lie.

This is awful. I went on a deep dive on Terrys site after that post. Full of sage advice, decent rss ideas, the astronomy page and the website, the options, colors all look fantastic. Not a good day for Terry.

This reads similar to a politician saying "I was hacked!" when embarrassing texts leak.