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 calledDarkHours.appreplied to my comment on Bluesky yesterday to show me how similar the project was to his, including the name. Thethread is here.
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 seenDarkHours.appbefore 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.