Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: 500 clocks in one 6.3 MB HTML file by Opus 5.5

41 points tkgally 3 hours ago 12 comments

Lately I've been testing frontier models by having them create self-contained web pages that display clocks--sort of my personal version of Simon Willison’s pelican-on-a-bicycle metric.

I have been particularly impressed by the variety, interest, and quality of the clocks created by Claude Opus 5.5. Over the course of several sessions in the Claude chat interface, I had it build a total of 500 clocks.

Claude’s summary of the prompting process and page design is here:

https://github.com/tkgally/500-clocks/tree/main

vunderba 2 hours ago | parent

Nice job. The Pong one was a nice touch where the ball traveled within a second from each paddle. I also enjoyed the interactive fiction game clock. It doesn’t really have much to do with time, but I still appreciated how the little descriptions changed over time.

Looking through all of these, you can definitely start to see patterns in themes. For example, it’s a clock but in a different language. Or it’s a clock but wrapped around a classic game - I think I saw Nine Men's Morris, Mancala and Scrabble among others.

I made the Chamber of Clocks [1] about half a year back which is a set of 12 different clockwork visualizations that I came up with so I was curious (and a bit trepidatious) when I saw this post. I was rather relieved to see that Opus 5.5 left to its own devices didn't create a single thing that resembled any of the ones I came up with.

The closest might be the Ctesibian water clock, but mine is significantly more elaborate, modeled as a 3D physical water wheel.

There’s another one I’ve seen floating around on HN — the Triclock [2] — which is particularly nice as well and worth checking out!

[1] - https://clocks.specr.net

[2] - https://triclock.franzai.com

tkgally 1 hour ago | parent

Very nice! I particularly like that pi clock.

I agree that Claude did tend to repeat certain themes. If someone wanted to extend the gallery to the thousands of clocks while maintaining the variety, they would probably need to seed the model with some original ideas. (Whether those ideas could come from a model or would need human taste is an interesting question.)

Also, Claude’s realizations of some of its ideas are a bit rough. If I wanted to create a standalone widget for a clock I particularly liked, I would spend more time with Claude (or another model) refining and polishing it first.

Nevertheless, considering that nearly all the ideas came from Opus and all the graphics are created with pure code, I remain impressed with what it was able to do.

ksimukka 1 hour ago | parent

Amazing. Thanks for sharing.

kromokromo 1 hour ago | parent

Once again, impressed by Opus 5.5 for a job well done. How much did this cost you?

gavmor 1 hour ago | parent

Gosh, these are so enticing yet such a let down.

For example, the Lorenz Attractor which, apparently, doesn't have anything to do with the clock.

tamimio 53 minutes ago | parent

It’s cool, but i think the actual use case of this, if someone is wasting your time you can share the 500 clocks and they can choose whatever they like to understand how important time is.

elxr 38 minutes ago | parent

80% of these are hideous. Why choose 500 instead of whittling it down a bit but having the quality bar a bit higher?

userbinator 37 minutes ago | parent

Claude’s summary of the prompting process and page design is here:

Was the README written by Claude too? I was expecting the usual Claudish, but it looks far more like normal human English.

and a helper library U

Perhaps Utility library would fit the name better.

tkgally 6 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I as noted at the top of the README, Claude wrote it all. Excerpts from my prompt to it: “Please compose a markdown file that I can put in the README.md for the repository explaining how this page was created and how it is structured (including how the images are generated).... Be clear that all of the coding and writing was done by Claude Opus 5.5.... Make the explanations plain and straightforward, with no boosting or bragging.”

ozanbora 26 minutes ago | parent

490,000–670,000 tokens each session a bit much, no?

tkgally 5 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I got carried away. It used a big chunk of my Max subscription tokens for this week.

compounding-err 17 minutes ago | parent

this was almost interesting