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.
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...
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.
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.
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, but you're correct. That's the reason for the complaints and the company has already taken an anti-AI stance precisely for this reason.
What bothers me about the D'Addario thing is that it never crossed the mind of that employee or the company what they're doing was wrong.
Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.
Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.
I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
Jeeeeezus. It's lies all the way down. Did we ever arrive at a true statement from them or is that where they left it?
The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI".
The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised.
At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone.
But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
> The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI".
>The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about.
Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
> I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
True. But the way it is approached is an exceptionally valuable yardstick for judging people's intent.
There is no way that "being at the forefront of AI" is a strategy that gets Fender anywhere except towards unthinking inward investment. Even in the narrow context of NAM captures and the like, it is clumsily antithetical to their audience to say this.
But writing off the one thing that actually sells guitars in the 21st century (covers bands!) as "analogue AI" is the most extraordinarily tone-deaf, rude, dismissive thing that someone who runs a musical instrument company could ever say.
In the late 2010s, the order (literally) from investors was to "hire as many devs as you can". The order now is to position the company somehow as being AI-centric or AI-powered.
> 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.
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.
I've been thinking about this. Almost every way we have to tell human from AI apart can be adopted and automated by AI. It's sort of a corollary of "every metric can be gamed".
It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
> 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 shaping up like he didn’t “forget” to mention it. This looks like 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.
I think "night vision" is different from dark mode. It's meant to prevent your eyes from adjusting to the light - so you can still see the stars - rather than just being easy to look at.
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's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
Only new submissions seem to be banned because Apple says there are too many. Clearly there are loads if you search the App Store. Gruber quotes and I re-quote:
> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
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. Not that there hasn't been other critical posts, but he's very positive about the brand.
Apple subsequently stopped providing Apple execs for his annual live podcast recording at WWDC. They don't confirm it was because of that piece (unsurprisingly) but it seems very likely it was.
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?
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.
If I understand the story correctly, it's even worse than "pivoted to astronomy". He used Claude to "accidentally" (doubtful) copy an existing astronomy app, bugs and all. It's like a pile of dishonesty upon dishonesty.
What a strange choice of words, "A developer who created another web app called DarkHours.app", another web app?
Either way, no good model from OpenAI or Anthropic will just copy a project 1:1 and not even include attribution prominently, it's something you can try doing now, and seeing what happens, results will be consistent enough. Here's what AI allows anyone with little to no expertise to do, however: take anything from anyone and flip it into your own with minimal work and effort, including decompiling it for you too. This would have not have been the effort before for anyone competent enough to do such things, and most of the time it was limited or only common with web projects or games built using Godot, web exported with wasm, etc. that could trivially be unpacked and reuploaded on stores with a different name, then they'd mass-strike the original one if present on the platform. Now anyone can do that, and it just so happens "I asked AI to make it and did not do my due diligence or pay any attention to what it was doing" is an excuse some people might fall for assuming goodwill.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"Incomplete mea culpa", "Incomplete admission", "Incomplete penance", "Incomplete contrition", "Incomplete remorse", actually say "the thing" instead of using a new random phrase.
I like "incomplete contrition" or "gas light remorse".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even with all these revelations, there’s still something so weird about this whole story. To go from crafting such a strong, principled app as Current to conjuring an AI-slop-fueled false narrative around an astrology app is such a wild swing in respectability.
I 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
Just blame the next thing down the chain that can't defend itself, so you don't have to take responsibility.
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
Entropy doesn't need to be set to zero for legally significant duplication
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.
I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page?
It's a very strange situation.
It's like "The computer did it" from the 80's and 90's. Blame the tool for the operator usage.
It's pathetic.
Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.
Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.
I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised.
At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone.
But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about.
Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
True. But the way it is approached is an exceptionally valuable yardstick for judging people's intent.
There is no way that "being at the forefront of AI" is a strategy that gets Fender anywhere except towards unthinking inward investment. Even in the narrow context of NAM captures and the like, it is clumsily antithetical to their audience to say this.
But writing off the one thing that actually sells guitars in the 21st century (covers bands!) as "analogue AI" is the most extraordinarily tone-deaf, rude, dismissive thing that someone who runs a musical instrument company could ever say.
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.
It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
I think it’s shaping up like he didn’t “forget” to mention it. This looks like 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.
Ooof that is a terrible dark mode theme.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
That's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
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=49228166
> 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.
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
Apple subsequently stopped providing Apple execs for his annual live podcast recording at WWDC. They don't confirm it was because of that piece (unsurprisingly) but it seems very likely it was.
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.
You are misattributing a quote.
Either way, no good model from OpenAI or Anthropic will just copy a project 1:1 and not even include attribution prominently, it's something you can try doing now, and seeing what happens, results will be consistent enough. Here's what AI allows anyone with little to no expertise to do, however: take anything from anyone and flip it into your own with minimal work and effort, including decompiling it for you too. This would have not have been the effort before for anyone competent enough to do such things, and most of the time it was limited or only common with web projects or games built using Godot, web exported with wasm, etc. that could trivially be unpacked and reuploaded on stores with a different name, then they'd mass-strike the original one if present on the platform. Now anyone can do that, and it just so happens "I asked AI to make it and did not do my due diligence or pay any attention to what it was doing" is an excuse some people might fall for assuming goodwill.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
And an identical bug, per the Bluesky convo Gruber linked.
https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...
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...
That seems to be the thing everyone is into, these days.
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?
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
>> The words are non-intuitive
Yeah.
"Incomplete mea culpa", "Incomplete admission", "Incomplete penance", "Incomplete contrition", "Incomplete remorse", actually say "the thing" instead of using a new random phrase.
I like "incomplete contrition" or "gas light remorse".
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/05/24/ive-been-a-little-di...
(from All You Zombies, by Robert A. Heineken, 2026, ebook)
This was a beautiful ending
It's as if real people are not all good or all bad, but can do good things, and bad things too.
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.
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
"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
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.
... but I'm not going to insert a link to his project - https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
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.
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?
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.
“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?
> 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...
There is some copyright discussion on one of the other submissions on this topic.
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.
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...
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...