Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

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.appThe 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. reply:...

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... reply: Yeah... If you even say to Claude I want to make an app like github.com/user/repo it's not gonna just clone it and do some touch ups. Anything can happen of course, but my spidey sense says generally AI won't fork a project unasked (just because of the implied maintenance burden of applying future patches from upstream if nothing else)

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. reply: > down to the nameAnd an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked.https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...

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.) reply: It’s really pitiful, because I was ready to leave a comment saying how actual apologies and taking responsibility have gotten rather rare (mostly because they leave the publishing party with lasting feelings of cringe/shame/other consequences), wanting to applaud at least that among this mess; but then reading on I got the same impression.An LLM/agent harness generally doesn’t just claim another project wholesale, including specific bugs, as the base of your idea, unless you ask it to.

It's not much of a mea culpa when there's not even a mention, let alone an apology, for misleading John Gruber.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166

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? reply: This is the Bluesky thread that Gruber linked where the original author calls out the copy: https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...You can trace back to the original repo from that thread. The key points are that the copy had1. The same name. One was "Dark Hours" and the other was "DarkHours".2. The same highly specific bug. I didn't investigate closely but from the description the bug sounds too unique to have been identically created in a fresh Claude-style duplication.The duplicated name is the most damning part to me....

He did the right thing. The very idea of Claude copying an existing project to answer one of my prompts or a whole project in Claude Code is a nightmare scenario.I have all but given up using the multiple trillion weight models in favor of smaller open weight models that have hopefully abstracted away copyrightable details. Right now deepseek-v4-flash-0731 seems usually perfect for my needs.I saw Cees de Groot post about LLM vibe coded projects containing all sorts of licensed material, and I think he is correct.Perhaps another good reason to just use the AGPL for new projects? I decided to use the AGPL for may latest fun project https://github.com/mark-watson/racket-coding-agent (personal AI coding harness written for my own use in Racket Scheme). Everything I do is open source or open content books, so I am happy to have everything I do to be used by humans and also for AI training, however: it is scary to by mistake be in the position of not acknowledging other work when appropriate.

I cannot fathom so thoroughly torching your own reputation (a quite positive one at that) in such a short period of time reply: Maybe it was worth it, Terry's RSS reader is number 1 on the paid news app chart.https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-rss-feed-reader/id6758...

> I was careless in relying on AI [...] That’s on meThis was a beautiful ending

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

I wish we lived in a society where bullshitting your way through a Mea Culpa would have consequences, but sadly I suspect someone is going to "punish" this one by giving them a top job or funding some equally bullshit startup.

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.

> While I had genuinely never seen DarkHours.app before yesterday, I was careless in relying on AI to generate the project without doing the work to understand whether it closely resembled an existing project. That’s on me, and I am responsible for what I published.Super-convincingly phrased, but after skimming how this unfolded without knowing the author, it could just as well be the inference result of Write a convincing apology and defence regarding this blog post / bsky thread I was totally caught off guard and making an honest, altruistic effort here!

I'm confused as to why Apple rejects astrology apps. They accept Bible and Koran apps...

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/ 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.

This current story is likely just the latest lie.

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

Wow, this is a genuinely crazy situation. I also have doubts that Claude can be prompted to wholesale copy an open source project like this, so I'm really curious to see receipts from Terry (session history, commits)

> web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed,How? How do I prompt to get a literal copy of another app? When Claude/Gemini builds anything for me I have a thousand ideas for functionality improvements and UI/UX changes. How do you just stop at v1 of what Claude gives you?

Setting aside everything except the stated intention behind the author's post -- ie. to make right something that he could only conclude was wrong after a little education -- what if agentic dev was removed from the equation and he made a similar app anyway?I understand that using agentic led to specific glitchy things like the recreation of an exact same bug arising from the exact same code which may -- very likely, actually, in cases where one of a narrow set of best practices (or dogma) are (blindly) followed -- or may not happen if you're building similar apps. A lot of people have a lot of the same ideas and the few from that set who actually pursue their goal will likely end up with similar products built with and operate using fairly similar patterns. What then?What if it's an improvement on the original? Like a vast improvement?Does a Pepsi or Burger King tell Coca Cola or McDonalds "You got it dawg ...", disrobe, hand over all their assets and find some place to die alone?

> 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.'comon now, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.That's a bit of an scorched earth extreme response imho.

I will say this: The first time App Store rejects your app, you feel enraged."These mfs are fuckin with my money, and when you fuck with my money, you fuck with my emotions!"So I write a damning blog post that will end Apple!!!It's rejected again."Yeah probably because they read my damning blog post, they're targeting me now!"Submit it again, following their stupid advice to target the right platform."Rejected again?!! It's probably The Jews doing this. It has to be. Who else would try to stop my amazing app from reaching the world???"Submit it again.Approved."...""...Oh. Oh yeah, it didn't work on iPad before that config change, I see. Hm. Yes you were right actually."

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.

Even with all these revelations, there’s still something so weird about this whole story. To go from crafting such a strong, principled app as Current to conjuring an AI-slop-fueled false narrative around an astrology app is such a wild swing in respectability.

> 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. I do ask questions, debug issues, things like that, but I do not create apps with Claude for iOS.I’m worried this is another lie. “Current,” Terry’s other app, is very obviously built by AI. Its interface carries all the tells (and slop-induced UI bugs) that you’d run into if an app was primarily built through vibe coding. I won’t get into the merits of whether the app works or is useful. I bought it and immediately requested a refund after I noticed all the AI tells.

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...

It's fine to build these apps that are clones of other's in my opinion but don't start publishing it for fame or fortune. Be humble, the computer did pretty much all of the work for you.

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?