{"slug": "mea-culpa-dark-hours", "title": "Mea Culpa – Dark Hours", "summary": "A developer who launched a web app called Dark Hours using Claude has shut it down and redirected its domain to DarkHours.app after discovering his project closely resembled the open source app, even reproducing a bug its creator had fixed. The developer apologized for his irresponsible use of AI and said he will no longer use AI in this way to create web projects.", "body_md": "Last week I launched a project called Dark Hours, which was a website utility to give you an idea of what could be seen in the sky that night.\n\nA developer who created another web app called [DarkHours.app](DarkHours.app) replied to my comment on Bluesky yesterday to show me how similar the project was to his, including the name. The [thread is here](https://bsky.app/profile/terrygodier.com/post/3ms2lm4kcfc2j).\n\nI told him I’d significantly differentiate the featureset, change the name, and write up a blog post to show people his project.\n\nAbout an hour later, once 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, it was clear that there wasn’t anything to do except to redirect the domain directly to him and kill any plans I had to launch an iOS app for the project.\n\nI’d like to give credit where credit is due. I think he’s made a wonderful open source app and if you liked the features that were included in what I launched, please use the actual version of the project. That’s what I’ll be doing.\n\nI’d also like to apologize for my irresponsible use of AI to build such a thing. While I had genuinely never seen [DarkHours.app](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.\n\nGoing 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 do ask questions, debug issues, things like that, but I do not create apps with Claude for iOS.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mea-culpa-dark-hours", "canonical_source": "https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html", "published_at": "2026-08-09 13:20:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-09 13:45:24.007290+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Dark Hours", "DarkHours.app", "Claude", "Bluesky"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mea-culpa-dark-hours", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mea-culpa-dark-hours.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mea-culpa-dark-hours.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mea-culpa-dark-hours.jsonld"}}