alt Hacker NewsShow HN: 500 clocks in one 6.3 MB HTML file by Opus 5.5
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:
Comments
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
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.
this was almost interesting
490,000–670,000 tokens each session a bit much, no?
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.
Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
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.
Once again, impressed by Opus 5.5 for a job well done. How much did this cost you?
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80% of these are hideous. Why choose 500 instead of whittling it down a bit but having the quality bar a bit higher?