Fair. I’d think they would look for prior work beforehand, but that’s perfectly valid.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Again, this was not a criticism, but a genuine question.

I can’t speak for the author, but this strikes me as the kind of thing you might not want to check prior work on. It just seems like a fun little project and sometimes seeing that other people have done it can be a bit demotivating.