Mea Culpa - Dark Hours

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 replied to my comment on Bluesky yesterday to show me how similar the project was to his, including the name. The thread 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 seen 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.