Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

swiftcoder

> Stealing an open source repo and launching it as your own app is a brazen move

Do you think he stole it directly, or an LLM reproduced it complete with existing bugs?

View on HN

I very much doubt an LLM is going to do that without explicitly being prompted to do so.

It is what he claims happened: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...

Curious. My money is on that guy lying again.

If anyone ever had AI copy an entire open source project accidentally, I would be interested to hear it.

Even the widely shared reports about specific snippets being reproduced relied on the user intentionally prompting for it.

Honestly, after being caught lying already, it's hard to believe him.

He should not be believed. That’s the consequences of perjury: one lie disqualifies all other testimony.

Unless he shows evidence of independent re-development like his LLM agent history or at the very least git commits, I'll consider that a lie

The LLM is more likely to fix any bugs it finds rather than explicitly reproducing it line by line, which it's actually quite bad at doing anyway, except for small, well-known pieces of code in its training set.

I refer you to his mea culpa: https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours...

I find that synopsis very hard to believe, seems he's shifting blame onto an LLM instead of taking responsibility for his actions. He said he'd significantly alter the feature set, so why didn't that happen? That's a single prompt to Claude. He more than likely just told the LLM to clone the repo and ship it as is, not actually working on it in any capacity. In that case it wasn't the AI "reproducing" a bug as there was no reproduction in the first place.

The author had fixed the bug. Had he cloned the repo, that bug would have not existed in the ripoff version, which points to the simplest explanation being that it was Claude, as the ripoff author said.

Depends when it was cloned, as the article does say the author later fixed the bug, so we are unsure when it was fixed.

Whether he stole it directly, by doing the 'work', or indirectly via an LLM, stealing it is wrong. If you generate something using an LLM, you have a responsibility to ensure you're not infringing on someone else's work.

I don’t disagree, and in this case a simple google search would have sufficed, it in the more general case, how?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com