12 ms·

Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

612 points by satvikpendem 2mo ago

Initial thread about original Gruber post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863 Gruber's retraction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166

bronlund 2mo ago
Claude did it! XD
iansmith_hn 2mo ago
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.
- timcobb 2mo ago
  He didn't really take responsibility?
gtowey 2mo ago
Kudos to the author for taking responsibility and doing the ethical thing here.
- stevage 2mo ago
  Ha, keep reading. https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
- kstrauser 2mo ago
  …eventually, after the alternatives failed.
chuckadams 2mo ago
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.
- glaslong 2mo ago
  "The dog plagiarized my homework"
- ceejayoz 2mo ago
  > down to the name And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked. https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2l https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
  - lmc 2mo ago
    The 'original' app made heavy use of Claude also, according to its dev in that thread.
    - ceejayoz 2mo ago
      But that makes this even more likely to be a ripoff. Getting Claude to make the same exact mistake twice in non-deterministic manner takes real effort!
      - lmc 2mo ago
        Mmm it's still a toss up. Humans are also non-deterministic AF but I'm sure you're familiar with the 'common pitfalls' trope. The 'mea culpa' guy did mislead the Daring Fireball guy, indicating he is full of shit, but LLMs do have an established homogeneity about them.
- K0balt 2mo ago
  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.
ciupicri 2mo ago
> 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 https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
- prodigycorp 2mo ago
  he redirected the domain darkhours.io to darkhours.app. seems pretty fair
  - cube00 2mo ago
    > seems pretty fair Until 1st August 2027 when the domain will expire (I doubt Terry will keep paying for the domain) leaving those users who memorised the .io version stranded. You'll note they only redirected it, they didn't offer to transfer the domain.
    - progval 2mo ago
      And they're using a temporary redirect (HTTP 302) so browsers won't automatically redirect users when this happens.
InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
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_rejection_of_the_week https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
- firasd 2mo ago
  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)
  - mft_ 2mo ago
    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.
  - supriyo-biswas 2mo ago
    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.
  - vikramkr 2mo ago
    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
user43928 2mo ago
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 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_rejection_of_the_week 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  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]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394
  - user43928 2mo ago
    I did not look into the details myself, but here are the links to the previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
      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.
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lellow 2mo ago
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.
- overtone1000 2mo ago
  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.
- ryan_n 2mo ago
  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...
eviks 2mo ago
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...
- satvikpendem 2mo ago
  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.
  - derdi 2mo ago
    Nobody mentioned copyrights or stealing in this thread.
    - derdi 2mo ago
      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.
      - satvikpendem 2mo ago
        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.
        deleted 2mo ago
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satvikpendem 2mo ago
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.
simonw 2mo ago
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_rejection_of_the_week https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
- lern_too_spel 2mo ago
  Gruber himself has misled his readers without a retraction for many years, but this one he gets to blame on someone else, so it's no skin off his back.
  - simonw 2mo ago
    What are your favorite examples of him misleading his readers?
    - lern_too_spel 2mo ago
      Bane gives multiple examples in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312. I mostly ignore Gruber's slop, but I have seen cases where he got technical details of Android multitasking wrong, which is nuts because it is both well documented and open source.
      - minimaxir 2mo ago
        How do you remember comments from over a decade ago?
        lern_too_spel 2mo ago
        Search. I don't actually remember that particular comment, but I know I've seen such comments before.
pohl 2mo ago
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.)
- msdz 2mo ago
  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.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  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 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.
  - 2mo ago
firasd 2mo ago
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
- maratc 2mo ago
  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.
  - rafterydj 2mo ago
    Do you utilize RSS? I've been trying to find a good RSS reader that incorporates some of the ideas his advocates, but I prefer Linux. Right now I'm using Thunderbird for it, but I'd love a good recommendation!
- vickychijwani 2mo ago
  I don’t particularly buy the author’s story here, but “doesn’t count how many new items are pending” is a feature for me. I don’t want my RSS reader to feel like yet another list of tasks I’ve to get through.
deleted 2mo ago
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underdeserver 2mo ago
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.
llm_nerd 2mo ago
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.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- timcobb 2mo ago
  > Bizarre. This is easily the most casually bizarre HN saga that I've experienced...
- fragmede 2mo ago
  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.
  - raincole 2mo ago
    > 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_rejection_of_the_week https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      > I’d also like to apologize for my irresponsible use of AI to build such a thing. 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. > 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. I'm going off of that on the linked article.
mechanicum 2mo ago
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?
- kaycey2022 2mo ago
  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.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  This is the Bluesky thread that Gruber linked where the original author calls out the copy: https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2l 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.
  - mechanicum 2mo ago
    I’ve seen the original repo, I mean Godier’s. A name clash is the least damning evidence in my opinion. Last year my previous employer asked us for suggestions for naming an AI agent. Everyone produced pretty much the same list, because everyone just asked ChatGPT. Except me. I had also asked ChatGPT, but I bothered to google the suggestions and found there were already like half a dozen AI agents for every suggestion. (they ultimately launched what was by then the 7th or 8th AI-related product with essentially the same name) Creativity in naming doesn’t seem to be their strongest suit.
hnlb53nrpg 2mo ago
Great breakdown
scotty79 2mo ago
> 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?
CircuitSeuss 2mo ago
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?
- Philpax 2mo ago
  When we have evidence that that's what actually happened and it's not the known-deceitful author trying to cover their own arse again?
NikxDa 2mo ago
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.
- willtemperley 2mo ago
  > "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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223079
  - slopinthebag 2mo ago
    What a funny thread. Probably not a great first impression for potential viewers
  - thraway3837 2mo ago
    It's funny, I saw that YT video in my feed and instantly was turned off from ever wanting to click on it. I know there is a write up about it, so I'd rather read than watch. Esp knowing what I know now.
- cube00 2mo ago
  My favorite is when they're clearly caught out so they move on to trying to minimise the use and optionally passively aggressively turn it back on you. "I was genuinely only using Claude to make my writing clearer/redraft/to organize my thoughts because I can't write as well as you can" The new one for me this week was someone claiming they write exactly like Claude does. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212416
none_to_remain 2mo ago
So Claude spit out similar code in response to similar prompts? Did Claude also suggest the same name twice?
jmull 2mo ago
This current story is likely just the latest lie.
IndySun 2mo ago
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.
- cube00 2mo ago
  I don't know, bloggers who publish teases in their feed frustrate me. https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-distant.html https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-di...
  - hahahaa 2mo ago
    He does a lot of microblogging it seems. Which is good. He is decentralizing twitter the simplest way possible!
- mikestew 2mo ago
  Full of sage advice, decent rss ideas, the astronomy page and the website, the options, colors all look fantastic. And how much of that is original with the blog author? Previously, one might have just given them the benefit of the doubt, as it should be. But now it swings the other way, and I'll assume that the author not only doesn't have an original thought in their head, they'll lie to cover their ass, too.
mvkel 2mo ago
This reads similar to a politician saying "I was hacked!" when embarrassing texts leak.
dwedge 2mo ago
> I was careless in relying on AI [...] That’s on me This was a beautiful ending
- drdrey 2mo ago
  "that's on me" just sounds like Claude is doing the talking
  - wlonkly 2mo ago
    ground truth
blitzar 2mo ago
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.
- mikestew 2mo ago
  Certainly, this isn't going to be career-ending, as it should. No, someone with just as few morals as OP will say to themselves, "just the kind of person I was looking for!", and the failing up begins.
  - latexr 2mo ago
    > Certainly, this isn't going to be career-ending, as it should. Maybe it’s not career-ending, but it’s definitely career-hurting. Being welcomed and mentioned by popular indie devs, bloggers, and power users is a way of breaking onto the scene. If those people now actively distrust you, maybe your current app(s) can continue to thrive for a while, but whatever you release next won’t get much traction from those same circles. Ben Surtees is another dev who scorched their name, by sneakily selling their app which required a bunch of permissions (and thus trust).
huebnerob 2mo ago
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.
- 1123581321 2mo ago
  Current was just a vibe-coded thing that blew up about a month before people started to become inured to the Claude Code look. The essay was intriguing but the app wasn’t like it. The app is essentially a standard RSS clone reader with water-themed names for folders, feeds, etc. (I paid for Current to try it when it came out.)
  - huebnerob 2mo ago
    That’d make sense, I don’t actually have any personal experience with Current so I was just going off the essay/site. But of course AI is quite good at making inordinately convincing versions of those.
classictraffic 2mo ago
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)
joshuat 2mo ago
I cannot fathom so thoroughly torching your own reputation (a quite positive one at that) in such a short period of time
- cube00 2mo ago
  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/id6758530974 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-rss-feed-reader/id6758...
  - timpera 2mo ago
    Understandable, it's a great app, though a bit expensive.
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barbazoo 2mo ago
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.
jaronilan 2mo ago
"I know where my code came from — but where did all you zombie's code come from?" -- Temporal Code Agent (from All You Zombies, by Robert A. Heineken, 2026, ebook)
cube00 2mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
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_HMCB_ 2mo ago
Dude, Daring Fireball’s post really shed a light on this matter. Your post here seems like you’re hiding a lot more.
parasti 2mo ago
> 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?
thraway3837 2mo ago
Terry Godier is a liar and a thief. That's all there is to it.
cadamsdotcom 2mo ago
[flagged]
- superdisk 2mo ago
  Isn't this post him showing remorse? There's really no reason to burn the guy at the stake.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- slim 2mo ago
  is there evidence that this person is real ?
  - pmlnr 2mo ago
    Github activity from 12 years ago should be an indicator: https://github.com/tgodier?tab=overview&from=2014-12-01&to=2014-12-31 https://github.com/tgodier?tab=overview&from=2014-12-01&to=2...
mark_l_watson 2mo ago
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 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.
fitsumbelay 2mo ago
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?
jv22222 2mo ago
> 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.
avazhi 2mo ago
You accidentally and completely unknowingly came up with an app with the same name that does the same thing down to having the same bug? Nah. This is marketing spam. Get this shit outta here.
viviansolide 2mo ago
Thank you for your integrity.
sicktriple 2mo ago
[dead]
terabytest 2mo ago
> 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.
- latexr 2mo ago
  > I bought it and immediately requested a refund Same. I tried on macOS and it was so buggy it was unusable. Basic shortcuts advertised on the website and app didn’t work at all. I also didn’t like the look and the limited options for streams, but I never even tried them in full because the bugs were frustrating, I was questioning if the app had had any testing at all.
- grvdrm 2mo ago
  What tells?
moritzwarhier 2mo ago
> 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 <url> / bsky thread <url> I was totally caught off guard and making an honest, altruistic effort here!
angry_octet 2mo ago
I'm confused as to why Apple rejects astrology apps. They accept Bible and Koran apps...
cyanmoonx 2mo ago
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."
- cyanmoonx 2mo ago
  Should have said The Catholics! It’s always The Catholics
fenestella 2mo ago
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NeoByte 2mo ago
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tidepooler 2mo ago
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tidepooler 2mo ago
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612 points by satvikpendem 2mo ago

bronlund 2mo ago

Claude did it! XD

iansmith_hn 2mo ago

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.

timcobb 2mo ago
He didn't really take responsibility?

gtowey 2mo ago

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

stevage 2mo ago
Ha, keep reading. https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
kstrauser 2mo ago
…eventually, after the alternatives failed.

chuckadams 2mo ago

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.

glaslong 2mo ago
"The dog plagiarized my homework"
ceejayoz 2mo ago
> down to the name And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked. https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2l https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
- lmc 2mo ago
  The 'original' app made heavy use of Claude also, according to its dev in that thread.
  - ceejayoz 2mo ago
    But that makes this even more likely to be a ripoff. Getting Claude to make the same exact mistake twice in non-deterministic manner takes real effort!
    - lmc 2mo ago
      Mmm it's still a toss up. Humans are also non-deterministic AF but I'm sure you're familiar with the 'common pitfalls' trope. The 'mea culpa' guy did mislead the Daring Fireball guy, indicating he is full of shit, but LLMs do have an established homogeneity about them.
K0balt 2mo ago
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.

ciupicri 2mo ago

> 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 https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours

prodigycorp 2mo ago
he redirected the domain darkhours.io to darkhours.app. seems pretty fair
- cube00 2mo ago
  > seems pretty fair Until 1st August 2027 when the domain will expire (I doubt Terry will keep paying for the domain) leaving those users who memorised the .io version stranded. You'll note they only redirected it, they didn't offer to transfer the domain.
  - progval 2mo ago
    And they're using a temporary redirect (HTTP 302) so browsers won't automatically redirect users when this happens.

InsideOutSanta 2mo ago

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

firasd 2mo ago
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)
- mft_ 2mo ago
  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.
- supriyo-biswas 2mo ago
  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.
- vikramkr 2mo ago
  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

user43928 2mo ago

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 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_rejection_of_the_week 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.

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
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]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394
- user43928 2mo ago
  I did not look into the details myself, but here are the links to the previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
    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.

deleted 2mo ago

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lellow 2mo ago

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.

overtone1000 2mo ago
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.
ryan_n 2mo ago
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...

eviks 2mo ago

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...

satvikpendem 2mo ago
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.
- derdi 2mo ago
  Nobody mentioned copyrights or stealing in this thread.
  - derdi 2mo ago
    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.
    - satvikpendem 2mo ago
      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.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]

satvikpendem 2mo ago

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.

simonw 2mo ago

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

lern_too_spel 2mo ago
Gruber himself has misled his readers without a retraction for many years, but this one he gets to blame on someone else, so it's no skin off his back.
- simonw 2mo ago
  What are your favorite examples of him misleading his readers?
  - lern_too_spel 2mo ago
    Bane gives multiple examples in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312. I mostly ignore Gruber's slop, but I have seen cases where he got technical details of Android multitasking wrong, which is nuts because it is both well documented and open source.
    - minimaxir 2mo ago
      How do you remember comments from over a decade ago?
      - lern_too_spel 2mo ago
        Search. I don't actually remember that particular comment, but I know I've seen such comments before.

pohl 2mo ago

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.)

msdz 2mo ago
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.
Aurornis 2mo ago
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 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.
- 2mo ago

firasd 2mo ago

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

maratc 2mo ago
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.
- rafterydj 2mo ago
  Do you utilize RSS? I've been trying to find a good RSS reader that incorporates some of the ideas his advocates, but I prefer Linux. Right now I'm using Thunderbird for it, but I'd love a good recommendation!
vickychijwani 2mo ago
I don’t particularly buy the author’s story here, but “doesn’t count how many new items are pending” is a feature for me. I don’t want my RSS reader to feel like yet another list of tasks I’ve to get through.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

underdeserver 2mo ago

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.

llm_nerd 2mo ago

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.

deleted 2mo ago
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timcobb 2mo ago
> Bizarre. This is easily the most casually bizarre HN saga that I've experienced...
fragmede 2mo ago
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.
- raincole 2mo ago
  > 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_rejection_of_the_week https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    > I’d also like to apologize for my irresponsible use of AI to build such a thing. 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. > 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. I'm going off of that on the linked article.

mechanicum 2mo ago

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?

kaycey2022 2mo ago
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.
Aurornis 2mo ago
This is the Bluesky thread that Gruber linked where the original author calls out the copy: https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2l 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.
- mechanicum 2mo ago
  I’ve seen the original repo, I mean Godier’s. A name clash is the least damning evidence in my opinion. Last year my previous employer asked us for suggestions for naming an AI agent. Everyone produced pretty much the same list, because everyone just asked ChatGPT. Except me. I had also asked ChatGPT, but I bothered to google the suggestions and found there were already like half a dozen AI agents for every suggestion. (they ultimately launched what was by then the 7th or 8th AI-related product with essentially the same name) Creativity in naming doesn’t seem to be their strongest suit.

hnlb53nrpg 2mo ago

Great breakdown

scotty79 2mo ago

> 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?

CircuitSeuss 2mo ago

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?

Philpax 2mo ago
When we have evidence that that's what actually happened and it's not the known-deceitful author trying to cover their own arse again?

NikxDa 2mo ago

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.

willtemperley 2mo ago
> "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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223079
- slopinthebag 2mo ago
  What a funny thread. Probably not a great first impression for potential viewers
- thraway3837 2mo ago
  It's funny, I saw that YT video in my feed and instantly was turned off from ever wanting to click on it. I know there is a write up about it, so I'd rather read than watch. Esp knowing what I know now.
cube00 2mo ago
My favorite is when they're clearly caught out so they move on to trying to minimise the use and optionally passively aggressively turn it back on you. "I was genuinely only using Claude to make my writing clearer/redraft/to organize my thoughts because I can't write as well as you can" The new one for me this week was someone claiming they write exactly like Claude does. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212416

none_to_remain 2mo ago

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

jmull 2mo ago

This current story is likely just the latest lie.

IndySun 2mo ago

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.

cube00 2mo ago
I don't know, bloggers who publish teases in their feed frustrate me. https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-distant.html https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-di...
- hahahaa 2mo ago
  He does a lot of microblogging it seems. Which is good. He is decentralizing twitter the simplest way possible!
mikestew 2mo ago
Full of sage advice, decent rss ideas, the astronomy page and the website, the options, colors all look fantastic. And how much of that is original with the blog author? Previously, one might have just given them the benefit of the doubt, as it should be. But now it swings the other way, and I'll assume that the author not only doesn't have an original thought in their head, they'll lie to cover their ass, too.

mvkel 2mo ago

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

dwedge 2mo ago

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

drdrey 2mo ago
"that's on me" just sounds like Claude is doing the talking
- wlonkly 2mo ago
  ground truth

blitzar 2mo ago

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.

mikestew 2mo ago
Certainly, this isn't going to be career-ending, as it should. No, someone with just as few morals as OP will say to themselves, "just the kind of person I was looking for!", and the failing up begins.
- latexr 2mo ago
  > Certainly, this isn't going to be career-ending, as it should. Maybe it’s not career-ending, but it’s definitely career-hurting. Being welcomed and mentioned by popular indie devs, bloggers, and power users is a way of breaking onto the scene. If those people now actively distrust you, maybe your current app(s) can continue to thrive for a while, but whatever you release next won’t get much traction from those same circles. Ben Surtees is another dev who scorched their name, by sneakily selling their app which required a bunch of permissions (and thus trust).

huebnerob 2mo ago

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.

1123581321 2mo ago
Current was just a vibe-coded thing that blew up about a month before people started to become inured to the Claude Code look. The essay was intriguing but the app wasn’t like it. The app is essentially a standard RSS clone reader with water-themed names for folders, feeds, etc. (I paid for Current to try it when it came out.)
- huebnerob 2mo ago
  That’d make sense, I don’t actually have any personal experience with Current so I was just going off the essay/site. But of course AI is quite good at making inordinately convincing versions of those.

classictraffic 2mo ago

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)

joshuat 2mo ago

I cannot fathom so thoroughly torching your own reputation (a quite positive one at that) in such a short period of time

cube00 2mo ago
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/id6758530974 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-rss-feed-reader/id6758...
- timpera 2mo ago
  Understandable, it's a great app, though a bit expensive.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 2mo ago

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.

jaronilan 2mo ago

"I know where my code came from — but where did all you zombie's code come from?" -- Temporal Code Agent (from All You Zombies, by Robert A. Heineken, 2026, ebook)

cube00 2mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

_HMCB_ 2mo ago

Dude, Daring Fireball’s post really shed a light on this matter. Your post here seems like you’re hiding a lot more.

parasti 2mo ago

> 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?

thraway3837 2mo ago

Terry Godier is a liar and a thief. That's all there is to it.

cadamsdotcom 2mo ago

[flagged]

superdisk 2mo ago
Isn't this post him showing remorse? There's really no reason to burn the guy at the stake.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
slim 2mo ago
is there evidence that this person is real ?
- pmlnr 2mo ago
  Github activity from 12 years ago should be an indicator: https://github.com/tgodier?tab=overview&from=2014-12-01&to=2014-12-31 https://github.com/tgodier?tab=overview&from=2014-12-01&to=2...

mark_l_watson 2mo ago

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 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.

fitsumbelay 2mo ago

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?

jv22222 2mo ago

> 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.

avazhi 2mo ago

You accidentally and completely unknowingly came up with an app with the same name that does the same thing down to having the same bug? Nah. This is marketing spam. Get this shit outta here.

viviansolide 2mo ago

Thank you for your integrity.

sicktriple 2mo ago

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terabytest 2mo ago

> 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.

latexr 2mo ago
> I bought it and immediately requested a refund Same. I tried on macOS and it was so buggy it was unusable. Basic shortcuts advertised on the website and app didn’t work at all. I also didn’t like the look and the limited options for streams, but I never even tried them in full because the bugs were frustrating, I was questioning if the app had had any testing at all.
grvdrm 2mo ago
What tells?

moritzwarhier 2mo ago

> 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 <url> / bsky thread <url> I was totally caught off guard and making an honest, altruistic effort here!

angry_octet 2mo ago

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

cyanmoonx 2mo ago

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."

cyanmoonx 2mo ago
Should have said The Catholics! It’s always The Catholics

fenestella 2mo ago

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deleted 2mo ago

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NeoByte 2mo ago

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tidepooler 2mo ago

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tidepooler 2mo ago

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