{"id":64881,"date":"2026-08-10T10:23:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T13:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/?p=64881"},"modified":"2026-08-10T10:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T13:30:20","slug":"terry-godier-dark-hours-plagiarize-claude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/en\/terry-godier-dark-hours-plagiarize-claude\/","title":{"rendered":"This guy used Claude to accidentally plagiarize an app"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terry Godier, who made a name for himself in certain corners of the web earlier this year with an essay on RSS<\/a> and his subsequent iOS app, Currents, launched another one called Dark Hours, this one on the web, after Apple reportedly rejected it for containing astrology elements, which the App Store’s policies ban and which Godier, at first, denied was the case.<\/p>\n

After all the fallout around the rejection, which Godier addressed in a post (since edited)<\/a> on his blog on Friday 7th<\/sup> (original<\/a>), a series of twists surfaced over the weekend.<\/p>\n

The first: contrary to Godier’s initial account, the rejected app did, in fact, contain astrology elements. It wasn’t even called Dark Hours; the name submitted to Apple was Asterly.<\/p>\n

But the story gets worse. Frustrated by the rejection, Godier tinkered with the app, removed the astrology stuff, and decided to launch it on the web instead. When he announced the launch of the now-renamed Dark Hours on Bluesky, he got a reply from Miguel Beher<\/a>, who had recently launched a similar web app with an almost identical name: DarkHours<\/a> (no space). Godier pushed back at first, but ran out of arguments when Beher pointed out a bug in Dark Hours \u2014 one that sent visitors to random locations in Mexico \u2014 which his own DarkHours also used to have, and which he had already fixed, as confirmed by the commit history in the GitHub repository.<\/p>\n

Godier’s Dark Hours was built entirely with Claude. (Beher’s DarkHours appears to be coded by Claude as well, but whatever.) In a “mea culpa”<\/a>, Godier said he had redirected his domain to Beher’s original and apologized:<\/p>\n

I\u2019d 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\u2019s on me, and I am responsible for what I published.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The irony of this story is that the generative AI didn’t \u201challucinate\u201d or make any mistake at all. It’s a probabilistic generator trained on the entire contents of the internet, including the DarkHours code<\/a> that Beher keeps open on GitHub. When Godier asked for a site with the same feature set as Beher’s, Claude already had the exact code sitting in its training data. And plagiarism was born!<\/p>\n

Poor John Gruber, the influential Apple commentator, who bought Godier’s story and had to retract a post<\/a> on his blog for the first time in 24 years.<\/p>\n

(The DarkHours site<\/a> is pretty cool. You type in a city name and it returns the probability that the night will be good for stargazing.)<\/p>\n

Credit to David Bushell for putting together the timeline<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terry Godier created an astronomy app that involved him in two embarrassing controversies: a supposedly wrong rejection on the App Store and a confirmed accusation of plagiarism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_locale":"en_US","_original_post":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/?p=64875"},"categories":[1575],"tags":[12,593,1913],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64881"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64881"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64885,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64881\/revisions\/64885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}