Mea Culpa - Dark Hours
37 points by tusharhero
37 points by tusharhero
Vibecoded website plagiarizes existing free software program.
Your summary misses an interesting part: It plagiarized an existing vibecoded free software program, from the looks of it.
The original author who got plagiarized used the same agents heavily, too.
Reminds me of this old joke we had in school where the teacher asked 2 students :
there's a difference between "claude, make this app whose features I will describe" and "claude, clone this app"
Eh. Obviously there’s a difference between the intent of those two requests, and I have no idea which one was reality here, but Claude is still gonna Claude, either way. Which is to say it will very eagerly copy without citing its sources. Because it doesn’t know it’s copying and can’t cite its sources.
I’m not persuaded that the difference in intent between your two requests there is meaningful when the outcome is predictably the same either way.
If the existing program was vibecoded with Claude and this new app was vibecoded the same way with the same model, it seems reasonable to expect that they'd be similar, right? They are coming from the same training data set and harness after all. Saying that this second app "plagiarized" the first one, or feeling sorry that it did, seems weird.
Of course it could be that Claude "researched" the Internet for similar ideas when asked to create the second app, and then replicated whatever it found in the open source repo... but I've never seen it operate that way yet.
Saying that this second app "plagiarized" the first one, or feeling sorry that it did, seems weird.
I have no inside knowledge. I'm purely basing that on the fact that the second human LLM operator felt the need to issue a public apology.
I do kind of suspect that the reason they turned out so similar is that they were using similar methods from similar sources.
If you and I both told the same model to implement quicksort from the original quicksort paper, they'd look a lot alike. And if we were working in the "sorting" problem space and both wanted to use LLMs to generate an implementation, we'd probably do that. Sharing some bugs would not be a big shock.
But assuming I felt OK about using an LLM for it, I wouldn't feel the need to turn over my quicksort online API to you, apologize, etc. The fact that Godier saw that need and all-but called it plagiarism on his own stands out to me here.
The story is fascinating. Not only is the app plagiarized, the prelude to this drama was that the author claimed he submitted it to the App Store for iOS and was rejected due to it being an "astrology" (not astronomy) app. That's some ragebait if I've ever heard any! John Gruber felt the same and wrote a scathing takedown of Apple's review process. Only, it turns out he originally did submit an astrology app, which was rejected - and then replaced the app's contents with the new vibe coded Dark Hours and re-submitted.
John Gruber has retracted his article, and posted a new one with the details and a link to the original here: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week
(Note: this story still feels a little fishy because the App Store doesn't ban astrology apps! You can look yourself - there are tons of them. But it's possible they would reject an uninteresting one as spam?)
Then there's the fact that Godier - whose ethics are already in question - "plagiarized" an existing vibe coded app. Did he? Probably. But maybe the agent simply regurgitated a very similar output when both users asked for similar things?
We certainly live in exciting times.
Re: App Store doesn’t ban astrology:
I’m sure Gruber mentions this in his article, but Apple apparently will reject apps in some low-value categories if there are already many apps like them that fulfil the purpose already; and divination (where astrology apps like the original Dark Hours originally fit) is one such category
Their first pull request on the "original" repo is from June 1, 2026. They probably just vibe coded it the same way