The Case of the Robot Web Thief

There’s been buzz recently about how a nascent web and mobile astronomy app, Dark Hours, got wildly incorrectly rejected from Apple’s App Store. Then maybe it turned out that the rejection wasn’t so wild because Apple may well have been looking at the astrology app the developer first submitted under the name “Asterly”. Then it turned out that the web version of Dark Hours was strikingly similar—although UI-wise, hardly identical—to an existing web app called DarkHours (camelcase rather than two words). It was so similar, in fact, that they both shared the same weird bug. All this led to Daring Fireball’s first-ever retraction and considerable opprobrium directed at Terry Godier, developer of Dark Hours (two words rather than camelcase). Godier was up front about creating his web app with Claude, writing in his apology, 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…