Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

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Summary

Developer Terry Godier apologizes after discovering his AI-generated web app 'Dark Hours' closely copied an existing open-source project, DarkHours.app. He redirects the domain to the original developer and pledges to stop using AI for app creation.

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Cached at: 08/09/26, 02:26 PM

# Mea Culpa - Dark Hours Source: [https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html](https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html) 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\. A developer who created another web app called[DarkHours\.app](https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/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)\. I told him I’d significantly differentiate the featureset, change the name, and write up a blog post to show people his project\. About 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\. I’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\. I’d also like to apologize for my irresponsible use of AI to build such a thing\. While I had genuinely never seen[DarkHours\.app](https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/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\. Going 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\.

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