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 developer was then in contact with a journalist 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. The journalist felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review.
Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.
I am not buying it.
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...
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.
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.
The bigger issue here is that he mislead (I think lied to, personally) John Gruber to the point that Gruber had to issue his first retraction in 25 years: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
I posted this 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.
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.
Since the other app is also heavily vibe-coded, it wouldn't make sense to kill your own, so I guess in reality this is questionable?
> 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...
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.
> I’d like to give credit where credit is due.
... but I'm not going to insert a link to his project - https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
he redirected the domain darkhours.io to darkhours.app. seems pretty fair
Kudos to the author for taking responsibility and doing the ethical thing here.
Ha, keep reading. https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
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].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394
I did not look into the details myself, but here are the links to the previous post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
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.
Oh I recall this story now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863
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.