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- Hacker News
- 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.by IndySun
- I don't know, bloggers who publish teases in their feed frustrate me.
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-di...
by cube00 - 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.
by mikestew - 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.by blitzar
- 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.by mikestew
- This reads similar to a politician saying "I was hacked!" when embarrassing texts leak.by mvkel
- > I was careless in relying on AI [...] That’s on me
This was a beautiful ending
by dwedge - "that's on me" just sounds like Claude is doing the talkingby drdrey
- He did the right thing. The very idea of Claude copying an existing project to answer one of my prompts or a whole project in Claude Code is a nightmare scenario.
I have all but given up using the multiple trillion weight models in favor of smaller open weight models that have hopefully abstracted away copyrightable details. Right now deepseek-v4-flash-0731 seems usually perfect for my needs.
I saw Cees de Groot post about LLM vibe coded projects containing all sorts of licensed material, and I think he is correct.
Perhaps another good reason to just use the AGPL for new projects? I decided to use the AGPL for may latest fun project https://github.com/mark-watson/racket-coding-agent (personal AI coding harness written for my own use in Racket Scheme). Everything I do is open source or open content books, so I am happy to have everything I do to be used by humans and also for AI training, however: it is scary to by mistake be in the position of not acknowledging other work when appropriate.
- I cannot fathom so thoroughly torching your own reputation (a quite positive one at that) in such a short period of timeby joshuat
- Maybe it was worth it, Terry's RSS reader is number 1 on the paid news app chart.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-rss-feed-reader/id6758...
by cube00 - 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?
by mechanicum - 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.by kaycey2022
- 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.
by Aurornis - It's not much of a mea culpa when there's not even a mention, let alone an apology, for misleading John Gruber.by cube00
- 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.)
by pohl - 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.
by Aurornis - 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.
by msdz - 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.by chuckadams
- Why not?
There have been quite a few copyright cases alleging this behavior that LLMs are not substantially transformative[1]. Note that cases have largely been ruled in the favor of the AI companies, with courts ruling that model output is “substantially transformative” of training material (although what is currently legally permissible may not be what we feel is socially permissible or ethical). The the fact that these allegations continue to be made, and the fact that AI companies seem to be trying to cover their asses by disallowing prompts which would be likely to create content highly similar to that of copyrighted training material [2] might be enough to at least warrant some consideration that Godier is being honest here.
Not that this would absolve Godier (quite the opposite in my mind- low effort ai workflows produce slop, and he chose this intentionally), but perhaps some of the onerousness here also falls on the AI companies pillaging of work.
[1] https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-copyright-lawsuit-developme... E.g. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/chatgpt-stops-cloning-fam...
by CircuitSeuss - 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.by K0balt
- "The dog plagiarized my homework"by glaslong
- For skeptics, just months ago in the midst of the AI hype it was common to ask if AIs were simply copying the input apps they were trained on, and would regurgitate them.
I find this plausible. I'd like to see the prompt and chat transcript.
by vintagedave - > down to the name
And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked.
https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
by ceejayoz - 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)by firasd
- On the previous HN posts I got this impression:
The developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps.
He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app "Dark Hours", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app
The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote an article claiming Apple's reviewers confuse a nice, scientific astronomy app with astrology. The developer reviewed the article before publication.
It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.
I am not buying it.
by user43928 - I think it’s entirely possible for someone to clone an app with Claude without realising they’ve done it, if they don’t do your due diligence on it. I.e., if they don’t make any effort to dig into and really understand what they’ve built.
But I also think this is an extreme example of a much more general problem of provenance.
There are a lot of people vibe-coding apps who lack the “basic” skills needed to do this due diligence at even the coarsest level that we arguably see here (not making any comment either way on this specific author).
Does that get them off the hook? I don’t think so. They’ve created a thing and they are naturally responsible for whether or not that thing involves theft or appropriation of IP from other sources.
It’s an “ignorance is not an excuse” kind of thing.
This scales all the way up to agentic development in large organisations, but it also becomes much more granular and subtle, which is perhaps where it becomes more interesting - and certainly a lot more challenging. Where has that chunk of code come from? How do you know where it’s come from? Is there even a feasible way of finding out?
by bartread - I’ve noticed that when a developer cries foul over an Apple App Store rejection, it often seems to be a red flag that there is something fishy about that developer. Gruber, not to his credit, often does not give Apple the benefit of the doubt on these matters. imho he bears some responsibility if he feels duped.by natch
- 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].