Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
blog.terrygodier.comOn 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 am not buying it.
Coincidentally:
Just in the last few weeks, D'addario, one of largest guitar string manufacturers, posted on Instagram what is clearly an AI-song to advertise its new line of guitar strings.
After being called out on it being AI, they posted a mobile-recording of the song recreated in a DAW, but it didn't even match the timing or the notes played.
After being called on it AGAIN, they blamed it on LANDR and Apple Mastering "changing the notes", but those only do "AI knob tweaking", they're not generative-ai audio synthesis. LANDR itself replied.
After being called on it AGAIN, they finally caved and said one of their workers used Suno without their knowledge.
After someone contacted the worker, he said he was pretty clear in his communication with D'addario that he had used Suno.
EDIT: The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know", but after someone did some digging in his Instagram profile, there's a few Suno songs and a lot of AI posters and avatars.
This sort of ass-covering is getting crazy with AI...
The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it.
And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass
> The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.
Yeah, I think that case is absolutely wild, because ostensibly the point of the recorded music was to showcase the strings.
Reminds me of politicians and public figures saying they got "hacked" after doing/posting something stupid and getting backlash for it. I guess "AI did it" is the new iteration on that.
And kids. I recently happened to see a pic on a kid's phone of him holding 5 vapes and a tin of snus, when challenged on it he said it was an AI-generated fake.
Sir Norman Fry Compilation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REpNTi-9oRQ
Appears to have replaced "fake news" as the go-to response
"The dog ate my homework"
Just blame the next thing down the chain that can't defend itself, so you don't have to take responsibility.
So true. “AI slop” is the new “Fake news”
> The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know"
This is not the defense they think it is.. If your mechanic rotates your tires and improperly torques the lug bolts "it was my first time using a torque wrench" isn't excusable. It's good to experiment and learn new things. It's not good to throw your little self-study project out into the world with your employer's name behind it and present it as production worthy material.
Before last year, I might've thought it was okay to throw out silly things as advertisements.
Do we know if it was the worker who presented it as such? Everyone has to learn and if they are learning on the job its up to their employer to ensure that the work product is reviewed or overseen by someone with adequate experience.
In this case, the author exchanged messages with someone, and he indeed claimed as such, according to the screenshots.
People online post timelapses for their AI generated artwork, that are also AI generated.
> 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
I think it’s clear that he didn’t “forget” to mention it. This was an intentional play for attention. It worked very well. Too well, in fact, which drew enough eyes on to the situation to start noticing the cracks in his story.
A key part of the Gruber retraction article is that Apple rejected a different app named Asterly. He then copied the Dark Hours app, including the name, from someone else and tried to imply that was the app at the center of the controversy.
If he had actually written his own astronomy app and swapped it into the story he may have gotten away with it. Doing the wholesale copying of someone else’s work, including the name of the project and stripping the license in the process, is what got him caught.
App Store rejection stories are always popular. I see at least one post a month on Hacker News from an app developer trying to get attention because their app was rejected and it usually receives moderate social media attention. I think this person saw an opportunity to ride that anger for some personal publicity and went for it. He flew too close to the sun and got too much attention, though, so his mistruths were revealed. Now he’s trying some CYA techniques because the original ruse backfired.
OP or dang should change the link to the DF retraction. While the app’s author has apparently produced some quality products, this puts a big asterisk next to that reputation.
That was already submitted and discussed [0], there's a reason I submitted this response by the author.
That's interesting. I had originally posted a "this dude is classy" comment, and may repost, but I'd like to find out more, beforehand.
Are there any links to this stuff that you can share?
[UPDATED] Ah. I see this post has it[0].
I did not look into the details myself, but here are the links to the previous post:
I know that not everyone is thrilled with Gruber, but I think this is classy (from his article):
> To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions, in several ways, but what I publish is my responsibility, and I apologize for the error.
Gruner is a true fan and tends to be overly positive about Apple but I don't doubt his integrity for a second. In cases when his reporting is overly favorable to Apple in my eyes, I do believe that he truly believes what he says.
It was interesting that his first retraction was due to a post being critical of Apple.
Gruber himself has written a number of posts critical of Apple, some of them scathingly so.
Yeah, any time I see someone accuse Gruber of being universally positive about Apple I think they can't have been reading his work very often.
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
Anyone that has been in the Apple ecosystem, for any length of time, has been insanely pissed off at them -usually, multiple times.
They are a pretty arrogant megacorp, and tend to make decisions that primarily benefit themselves.
But I generally have a positive relationship with them.
I fully agree. That’s how you own a mistake.
I’m struggling to see how this wasn’t intentional by Godier, but I can’t understand what he was hoping to get out of it. Surely the truth would have come out eventually. Was one day of fame worth it?
And Gruber, being Gruber, says that this guy's RSS reader is so good that it would prevent people from switching to Android. Sure.
Oh I recall this story now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863
I, too, feel entirely duped. What the heck dude. Uploading an astrology app that later pivoted to astronomy and having that be rejected for astrology is a way different problem from just having the latter rejected for astrology.
Thanks for drawing the chain. Infuriating.
We are personally responsible for what our agents do. I don’t know why someone thinks “oops Claude did it” is a valid excuse.
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...
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)
I have tried this with Codex, and if you ask it to implement a project based on an algorithm or design in a given repo, it always puts an attribution link saying that part of it was adapted from that repo. Unfortunately I think we’re being duped here.
Yeah - the whole Claude did it thing here reads to me like blaming a grammar issue on an LLM. Yes they have their issues but this isn't one of them - they're not deterministic they aren't going to make the exact same bug as a project you never heard of unless it's a specific technical shortcoming/training data gap/skill issue of the model. If you say "I want something exactly like xyz in every way" though then sure - but you're claiming you never asked for that? Not passing the sniff test here
Also, Claude has the habit of finding and fixing bugs without being asked - for example, in code that an earlier version of itself wrote. So while you can never be sure, there's a non-zero chance that even if it had copied the original code it would have found and fixed the accidental trap.
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.
> down to the name
And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked.
https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
And it’s even more stupid because he just could have asked Claude to build it from scratch. I mean, it’s not Rocket science and all of the resources needed are in the public domain. It would be done in 3 days. 4 hours if you want to ship hot garbage.
"The dog plagiarized my homework"
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.)
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.
Interesting! I had never heard that phrase before. The words are non-intuitive, but that's exactly what's happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
Now that you've introduced the phrase I can see it in a lot of recent scandals.
Peter Attia, a popular health and longevity podcaster who was revealed to have substantial ties to Jeffrey Epstein used this exact trick recently. When the Epstein e-mails were released it was discovered that he continued to consort with Epstein after all of the revelations. Even worse, he talked to Epstein about the fallout from the accusations and continued to cozy up to him. He was trying to run a very expensive concierge medical clinic and relied on Epstein's connections to get more clients, so he wanted to continue keeping that relationship warm.
When the e-mails came out he issued a public non-apology that implied he had no idea about any of Epstein's activities. It was plausible enough if you never saw the actual e-mails and thought Epstein was just another contact in his network, but the actual e-mails revealed that he was continuing to converse with Epstein after the revelations, including about the revelations!
So "limited hangout" is precisely what he and his PR team tried to execute. It seems to have worked on a limited set of his fan base who still try to downplay his Epstein connections to this day. The e-mails are easy to find, though.
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?
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 had
1. 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. I've never tried to copy a project with Claude, but I can't imagine the sequence of events that would lead to Claude copying the name of a repo but going to lengths to disguise other things like stripping the license. This all seems highly intentional, like someone thought it would never be noticed.
If the copying was deliberate then why admit to the similarity? He should have just blocked the guy and continued as if nothing was wrong. Admitting the plagiarisation lead to a worse outcome every time.
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)
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.
> I was careless in relying on AI [...] That’s on me
This was a beautiful ending
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.
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
This whole affair seriously undermines Terry's credibility, however it needs to be said that his take on how RSS readers should work is genuinely new and -- to some audiences -- interesting.
It's as if real people are not all good or all bad, but can do good things, and bad things too.
This reads similar to a politician saying "I was hacked!" when embarrassing texts leak.
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.
Claude did it! XD
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.
> "Claude did it" cannot ever be a valid excuse.
I think this an incredibly important point. As soon as we devolve reposnsiblity to computer progams, society cedes control to the algorithm vendors.
Jeff Geerling was called out today for his clickbaity video entitled "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously.". Jeff's personal response was "I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it."
Another commenter replied: "You are trying to launder responsibility for a clickbait title to a computer program." I think this exactly nailed the problem.
This current story is likely just the latest lie.
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.
So Claude spit out similar code in response to similar prompts? Did Claude also suggest the same name twice?
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...
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.
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?
When we have evidence that that's what actually happened and it's not the already-known-deceitful author trying to cover their own arse again?
> 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
he redirected the domain darkhours.io to darkhours.app. seems pretty fair
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...
Well if the other app was vibe coded I guess technically there was no copyright to it at all, ironic to talk about stealing in that case. I don't care about either party here so don't construe this comment as defending the author but I find the situation amusing with the current copyright laws.
Nobody mentioned copyrights or stealing in this thread.
Haha, excellent downvote, thanks. I stand corrected, one other person mentioned the word "copyright" in the time between me searching the discussion for that term, and then writing and posting.
There is some copyright discussion on one of the other submissions on this topic.
Yes not in this thread but in the other submissions lots of people said the author was "stealing" the code but turns out the MIT original wasn't even eligible to be under that license as it has no copyright.
> 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?
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.
> Bizarre.
This is easily the most casually bizarre HN saga that I've experienced...
Can't, you don't list an email address on your profile.
He fucked up and is owning up to it. Sure we all wish it never happened in the first place, but since he did, we prefer he confess rather than double down and go on offense or something else. The AI didn't "eat his homework". He's not a student, this wasn't a homework assignment.
> He fucked up and is owning up to it
No? He doubled down hard and proceeded to insult all the readers' intelligence. Just in case it's not clear: no one believes that Claude accidentally created that bug-to-bug ripoff app.
Read the link and the previous one: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
Great breakdown
Kudos to the author for taking responsibility and doing the ethical thing here.
Ha, keep reading. https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
…eventually, after the alternatives failed.
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.
He didn't really take responsibility?
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.
That would be true with or without AI. That isn't what happened here.
Open source isn't just code, it's an idea, a public square, and a community.
Fork a repo and customize to your heart's content? Go for it!
Fork a repo, change nothing substantial, and publish it with a nearly identical name in the app store and on a nearly identical domain? At the very least, that's in poor taste.
The dude had claude copy a repo bug for bug. Where is the "taste" and "creativity" in that?
> I fully support open-source, but I support way more the creativity and idea from individuals that can generate something new.
None of that happened here...