Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

Last week, I launched a project called Dark Hours, a website utility designed to provide users with a glimpse of celestial events that night. A developer had created another web app, DarkHours.app, and upon noticing similarities between the two projects, including their names, I reached out to the developer to discuss the issue.

I had assured the developer that I intended to differentiate the features, rename the project, and write a blog post highlighting the developer's work. However, shortly after launching the website through Claude, I realized that my creation was strikingly similar to the open-source DarkHours.app, even reproducing a bug that the developer had since fixed. It was evident that rectifying the situation was the only option available to me.

I would like to extend my gratitude to the developer for his exceptional open-source app, and I encourage anyone who appreciated the features I initially launched to utilize the actual version of the project. This is precisely what I plan to do moving forward. I also extend my sincere apologies for my irresponsible use of AI to create the project.

Despite never having encountered DarkHours.app before yesterday, I inadvertently relied on Claude to generate the project without thoroughly researching whether it bore a striking resemblance to an existing project. I take full responsibility for what I published.

In the future, I vow to refrain from utilizing AI for creating web applications and will ensure that any AI usage I engage in for iOS software remains minimal and focused on debugging and query-based tasks rather than full-scale app development.