A story about a “Huangguo coder who was denied credit and angrily open-sourced the client” has recently gone viral on X, but it does not match the announcement from the actual maintainer of the GitHub project. (Previously: “Huangguo Short Dramas,” an AI adult short-video platform, goes viral among Chinese speakers, with “turning off the filters” becoming a paid feature.) (Background: An in-depth analysis of Huangguo Short Dramas: from its business model and dual-track model to production workflows, costs, and legal risks.) A story about a “furious coder who quit and open-sourced his work” has recently been circulating on Chinese-language X. On 11/11, the X account @kamrynchohon4 (display name: “Furious Huangguo Coder Who Quit”) posted a long thread, claiming to be a former developer at Huangguo Short Dramas. He said that a lightweight client he had written in his spare time was handed by his supervisor to a new “favored insider” to develop as an official project. He then received a D rating in performance reviews for two consecutive months. When he quit, he was asked to sign over the client to the company, but refused. After leaving, he open-sourced the “third-party client I wrote in my spare time” on GitHub under the project name HGhub, writing, “I’ve already voluntarily taken down the original repository.” The post received over 800,000 views. On 11/13, the X account “Huangguo AI Short Dramas Official” issued a clarification, saying the story was a “personal fictional dramatization,” that the company had never open-sourced its core code, and that HGhub was unrelated to the company. The coder responded the same day, saying his accusations were directed at certain people within the company. Around 11/14, he posted a screenshot of his payslip: total pay of 59,800, deductions of 14,700, take-home pay of 45,100, and no project bonus. On 11/15, Chinese-language KOLs retold the entire thread as a real exposé of workplace misconduct. What does the actual maintainer say? However, our fact-checking suggests this may simply have been a promotional tactic. The HGhub repository was created on 2026-11-03 and gained around 8,800 stars and over 6,700 forks in just over a week. But on 11/10, the maintainer account WEP-56 deleted all the code and releases, leaving only a note: “I’m stopping maintenance for personal reasons” and “I’m safe and well; no upstream party or organization has taken action against me.” That same day, replying to a user in an issue, the maintainer said it was “just a toy I threw together for practice… and somehow it inexplicably went viral.” This was before the coder’s first post on 11/11. On 11/12, WEP-56 posted an announcement in GitHub issue #65, stating that @kamrynchohon4 had claimed to be the driving force behind open-sourcing the project, but “that account does not match the facts.” The repository had been “created and taken down entirely by the original author,” and the project had “no employment or collaborative relationship” with any official “Huangguo” team. The announcement also named sites with similar domains, such as huangguoduanju, warning that they “are not part of this project or any known official channel and pose a significant risk of misleading users and compromising security.” It added that the main publicly verifiable official channel is huangguoai.com. What to watch out for What you should be wary of isn’t whether the gossip is true, but the website the story ultimately urges you to visit—and the cloud-drive files offered in exchange for comments. WEP-56’s warning is straightforward: don’t enter your account details on unofficial websites, and don’t download unknown clients. Related reports A Chinese designer quits to make AI short dramas (Reborn Mantis), spending 4,000 yuan, with views surpassing 600 million Hongguo Short Dramas becomes China’s fourth-largest app: daily active users hit 168 million in July, surpassing the combined total of four long-form video platforms 220,000 AI short dramas launched in China in the first half of the year, but 98.7% lost money This article, “Huangguo Short Dramas’ ‘furious coder quits and open-sources his work’ goes viral; actual author comes forward to deny it,” was first published by BlockTempo (Dongqu Dongqu — the most influential blockchain news outlet).