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Comment by mechanicum | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to see the other repo, and the prompts that led to both.

Did Godier copy the other guy’s repo, name and all, and try to pass it off as his own work? That seems like the obvious conclusion, albeit brazen to the point of insanity.

Did Claude copy the repo, in response to a prompt? If Claude copies a Claude vibe-coded project, can any plagiarism really be said to have taken place?

Or is this just what Claude is statistically likely to spit out if you prompt it to build an astronomy app and leave it to it?

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This is the Bluesky thread that Gruber linked where the original author calls out the copy: https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2...

You can trace back to the original repo from that thread. The key points are that the copy had

1. The same name. One was "Dark Hours" and the other was "DarkHours".

2. The same highly specific bug. I didn't investigate closely but from the description the bug sounds too unique to have been identically created in a fresh Claude-style duplication.

The duplicated name is the most damning part to me. I've never tried to copy a project with Claude, but I can't imagine the sequence of events that would lead to Claude copying the name of a repo but going to lengths to disguise other things like stripping the license. This all seems highly intentional, like someone thought it would never be noticed.

I’ve seen the original repo, I mean Godier’s.

A name clash is the least damning evidence in my opinion. Last year my previous employer asked us for suggestions for naming an AI agent. Everyone produced pretty much the same list, because everyone just asked ChatGPT.

Except me. I had also asked ChatGPT, but I bothered to google the suggestions and found there were already like half a dozen AI agents for every suggestion.

(they ultimately launched what was by then the 7th or 8th AI-related product with essentially the same name)

Creativity in naming doesn’t seem to be their strongest suit.

> they ultimately launched what was by then the 7th or 8th AI-related product with essentially the same name

let me guess, they called it "Copliot"

If the copying was deliberate then why admit to the similarity? He should have just blocked the guy and continued as if nothing was wrong. Admitting the plagiarisation lead to a worse outcome every time.

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