And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked.
https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
... but I'm not going to insert a link to his project - https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
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.
Are there any links to this stuff that you can share?
[UPDATED] Ah. I see this post has it[0].
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.
> 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...
> While I had genuinely never seen DarkHours.app before yesterday
If only there were a way to share your own commits resulting from your own Claude sessions to verify whether it's true...
I 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.
(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 as if real people are not all good or all bad, but can do good things, and bad things too.
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.
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.
This is easily the most casually bizarre HN saga that I've experienced...
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
> 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.
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, 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.
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...
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.
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