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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

by thecr0w on 12/7/2025, 5:18:54 PM

https://j0nah.com/i-failed-to-recreate-the-1996-space-jam-website-with-claude/

Comments

by: wilsmex

Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90&#x27;s I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however:<p>&quot;The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.&quot;.<p>This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn&#x27;t a thing back then...<p>Here was its one-shot attempt at building the same type of layout (table based) with a screenshot and assets as input: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;fhdOLwP.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;fhdOLwP.png</a>

12/7/2025, 11:02:10 PM


by: thuttinger

Claude&#x2F;LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM. On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don&#x27;t support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn&#x27;t let Claude write the code. With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:<p>- Read an .icc file from disk<p>- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)<p>- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs<p>The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).

12/7/2025, 7:44:17 PM


by: smoghat

Ok, so here is an interesting case where Claude was almost good enough, but not quite. But I’ve been amusing myself by taking abandoned Mac OS programs from 20 years ago that I find on GitHub and bringing them up to date to work on Apple silicon. For example, jpegview, which was a very fast and simple slideshow viewer. It took about three iterations with Claude code before I had it working. Then it was time to fix some problems, add some features like playing videos, a new layout, and so on. I may be the only person in the world left who wants this app, but well, that was fine for a day long project that cooked in a window with some prompts from me while I did other stuff. I’ll probably tackle scantailor advanced next to clean up some terrible book scans. Again, I have real things to do with my time, but each of these mini projects just requires me to have a browser window open to a Claude code instance while I work on more attention demanding tasks.

12/7/2025, 7:12:54 PM


by: yosito

This has been my experience with almost everything I&#x27;ve tried to create with generative AI, from apps and websites, to photos and videos, to text and even simple sentences. At first glance, it looks impressive, but as soon as you look closer, you start to notice that everything is actually just sloppy copy.<p>That being said, sloppy copy can make doing actual work a lot faster if you treat it with the right about of skepticism and hand-holding.<p>It&#x27;s first attempt at the Space Jam site was close enough that it probably could have been manually fixed by an experienced developer in less time than in takes to write the next prompt.

12/8/2025, 4:04:36 AM


by: sqircles

&gt; The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element...<p>Absolute positioning wasn&#x27;t available until CSS2 in 1998. This is just a table with crafty use of align, valign, colspan, and rowspan.

12/7/2025, 8:43:46 PM


by: charcircuit

&gt;I&#x27;d like to preserve this website forever and there&#x27;s no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot.<p>There are other ways such as downloading an archive and the preserving the file in one or more cloud storages.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;download&#x2F;cXI46.zip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;download&#x2F;cXI46.zip</a>

12/8/2025, 1:25:46 AM


by: sigseg1v

Curious if you&#x27;ve tested something such as:<p>- &quot;First, calculate the orbital radius. To do this accurately, measure the average diameter of each planet, p, and the average distance from the center of the image to the outer edge of the planets, x, and calculate the orbital radius r = x - p&quot;<p>- &quot;Next, write a unit test script that we will run that reads the rendered page and confirms that each planet is on the orbital radius. If a planet is not, output the difference you must shift it by to make the test pass. Use this feedback until all planets are perfectly aligned.&quot;

12/7/2025, 6:20:26 PM


by: stared

Just use Playwright Skill (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lackeyjb&#x2F;playwright-skill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lackeyjb&#x2F;playwright-skill</a>). It is a game changer. Otherwise it is Claude the Blind, as OP mentioned.

12/8/2025, 9:18:47 AM


by: taf2

In my experience codex has been better at details like this. But who knows working with an llm much like another engineer is all about how you ask and then how you iterate with the llm.

12/8/2025, 12:40:15 PM


by: Wowfunhappy

Claude is not very good at using screenshots. The model may <i>technically</i> be multi-modal, but its strength is clearly in reading text. I&#x27;m not surprised it failed here.

12/7/2025, 5:57:50 PM


by: 999900000999

Space Jam website design as an LLM benchmark.<p>This article is a bit negative. Claude gets close , it just can&#x27;t get the order right which is something OP can manually fix.<p>I prefer GitHub Copilot because it&#x27;s cheaper and integrates with GitHub directly. I&#x27;ll have times where it&#x27;ll get it right, and times when I have to try 3 or 4 times.

12/7/2025, 6:05:23 PM


by: city17

Lovable was able to one-shot it (except for the top margin): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacejam-pixel-perfect.lovable.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacejam-pixel-perfect.lovable.app&#x2F;</a><p>All I did was give Lovable a single prompt: &quot;with pixel perfect accuracy recreate this website: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacejam.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacejam.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;</a>&quot;<p>Edit: Commenter below may be right.

12/8/2025, 11:23:38 AM


by: manlymuppet

Couldn’t you just feed Claude all the raw, inspect element HTML from the website and have it “decrypt” that?<p>The entire website is fairly small so this seems feasible.<p>Usually there’s a big difference between a website’s final code and its source code because of post processing but that seems like a totally solvable Claude problem.<p>Sure LLMs aren’t great with images, but it’s not like the person who originally wrote the Space Jam website was meticulously messing around with positioning from a reference image to create a circular orbit — they just used the tools they had to create an acceptable result. Claude can do the same.<p>Perhaps the best method is to re-create, rather than replicate the design.

12/7/2025, 11:13:35 PM


by: soared

I got quite close with Gemini 3 pro in AI studio. I uploaded a screenshot (no assets) and the results were similar to OP. It failed to follow my fix initially but I told it to follow my directions (lol) and it came quite close (though portrait mode distorted it, landscape was close to perfect.<p>“Reference the original uploaded image. Between each image in the clock face, create lines to each other image. Measure each line. Now follow that same process on the app we’ve created, and adjust the locations of each image until all measurements align exactly.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aistudio.google.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%5B%221O7xgsnQ5l96m1a61WhT90RE00rvj_aMt%22%5D,%22action%22:%22open%22,%22userId%22:%22110467242301970218864%22,%22resourceKeys%22:%7B%7D%7D&amp;usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aistudio.google.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...</a>

12/7/2025, 7:36:26 PM


by: liampulles

It seems to me that Claude&#x27;s error here (which is not unique to it) is self-sycophancy. The model is too eager to convince itself it did a good job.<p>I&#x27;d be curious to hear from experienced agent users if there is some AGENTS.md stuff to make the LLM more clear speaking? I wonder if that would impact the quality of work.

12/8/2025, 7:31:23 AM


by: mxfh

Everything feels wrong with that approach too me, starting with calling a perfectly time-appropriate website <i>anachronistic</i>.<p>Anachronistic would be something like creating an apparent flash website for a fictional 90s internet related movie.

12/8/2025, 3:21:36 AM


by: jackfranklyn

The real kicker is that LLMs were trained on modern web dev content where &quot;tables for layout&quot; is a cardinal sin. So you&#x27;re asking it to do something its training data actively told it NOT to do for years.<p>Email HTML development is the last bastion of table-based layouts and it&#x27;s wild that it&#x27;s still necessary in 2024. Every time I touch email templates I feel like I&#x27;m time traveling.

12/8/2025, 9:23:03 AM


by: pfix

I checked the source of the original (like maybe many of you) to check how they actually did it and it was... simpler than expected. I drilled myself so hard to forget tables as layout... And here it is. So simple it&#x27;s a marvel.

12/7/2025, 7:47:33 PM


by: voodooEntity

THanks for sharing this. Partly because i forgot about this great website :D also because i would never thought of giving this as an LLM task because its so simple that i prolly just had hacked it down myself :D<p>I recently experimented alot with agentic coding (mostly with gemini+ intellij plugin, copilot intellij plugin and intellij&#x27;s own junie) and also condsidered to give it a try and feed images to the AI, but than all tasks i tried so far were pure backend-ish so it never came to the point.<p>Im really curious how especially junie will act and i will give it a try with the very same task you gave it. We gonne see how it ends :D

12/8/2025, 7:40:24 AM


by: p0w3n3d

LLM stands for large LANGUAGE models, so I guess you could succeed if you had a correct LANGUAGE. Maybe radial coordinates? Or turtle graphics? I myself tried to generate an SVG with twelve radial dots as in a clock in chatgpt, and failed (a year ago). Now I think it would succeed, however still the question is does it succeed because people trained it to do so.<p>Also I have noticed that AI generates things close to what you want, and it sticks really hard to that &quot;close&quot; qualifier, not wanting to cross any borders to get too close, so I&#x27;d be happy with the effect you have shown, as it is what AI does

12/8/2025, 7:41:50 AM


by: buchwald

Claude is surprisingly bad at visual understanding. I did a similar thing to OP where I wanted Claude to visually iterate on Storybook components. I found outsourcing the visual check to Playwright in vision mode (as opposed to using the default a11y tree) and Codex for understanding worked best. But overall the idea of a visual inspection loop went nowhere. I blogged about it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solbach.xyz&#x2F;ai-agent-accessibility-browser-use&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solbach.xyz&#x2F;ai-agent-accessibility-browser-use&#x2F;</a>

12/8/2025, 12:09:49 AM


by: ettsvensktlogin

This was very interesting. I&#x27;ve tried to create an &quot;agent&quot; Claude Code based system to generate design from screenshots, using Playwright and other tools to take screenshots for iterative improvements. So far I have failed despite weeks of struggles.<p>Thanks to this post I now have a deeper understanding as to why. Thank you.

12/8/2025, 8:52:14 AM


by: ErrantX

I just feel this is a great example of someone falling into the common trap of treating an LLM like a human.<p>They are vastly less intelligent than a human and logical leaps that make sense to you make no sense to Claude. It has no concept of aesthetics or of course any vision.<p>All that said; it got pretty close even with those impediments! (It got worse because the writer tried to force it to act more like a human would)<p>I think a better approach would be to write a tool to compare screenshots, identity misplaced items and output that as a text finding&#x2F;failure state. claude will work much better because your dodging the bits that are too interpretive (that humans rock at and LLMs don&#x27;t)

12/7/2025, 10:04:39 PM


by: badlogic

Loved the fun write up. Now that we know that LLM-based vision is lossy, here&#x27;s a different challenge:<p>Give the LLM access to the site&#x27;s DOM and let it recreate the site with modern CSS. LLMs are much better with source code, aka text, right? :)

12/8/2025, 9:02:33 AM


by: anorwell

The article does not say at any point which model was used. This is the most basic important information when talking about the capabilities of a model, and probably belongs in the title.

12/7/2025, 10:00:54 PM


by: jdironman

I am going to give this a shot, but using a method I have been using lately with subagents. Basically, what I do is have it create an Architect, Executor, Adjudicator subagents. Architect breaks any ask down into atomic and testable subtasks that take 1-3 minutes &#x27;dev&#x27; time. Executor (can spawn more than one) implements them. Then adjudicator reviews that they are to spec &#x2F; requirements. This all happens in subagent files + a runbook.json in the .claude folder of a project. Its based on a paper* that was featured on here a while back actually [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2511.09030" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2511.09030</a>

12/8/2025, 3:46:14 AM


by: torginus

Not sure how good Claude is nowadays, but I remember using Claude 3.5 to do some fiction writing and for a while I thought it was amazing at coming up with plots, setting ideas, writing witty dialogue - then after a short while I noticed it kept recycling the same ideas, phrases etc, quickly becoming derivative, and having &#x27;tells&#x27;, similar to the group of 3 quirk, with some otherwise decent writing patterns showing up with great frequency.<p>I&#x27;ve heard the same thing about it doing frontends - it produces gorgeous websites but it has similar &#x27;tells&#x27;, it does CSS and certain features the same way, and if you have a very concrete idea of what you want out of it, you&#x27;ll end up fighting an uphill battle with it constantly trying to do things its own way.<p>Which is part of the &#x27;LLM illusion&#x27; - I guess. To an unskilled individual, or when starting from scratch, it seems great, but the more complex the project gets, the harder it becomes to have it contribute meaningfully, leading to an ever-mounting frustration, and eventually me just giving up and doing it by hand.

12/7/2025, 11:33:23 PM


by: baq

new LLM benchmark just dropped. &#x27;draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle browsing spacejam 1996 on 640x480 ie6&#x27;.

12/8/2025, 11:54:05 AM


by: daemonologist

Interesting - these models are all trained to do pixel-level(ish) measurement now, for bounding boxes and such. I wonder if you could railroad it into being accurate with the right prompt.

12/7/2025, 6:35:12 PM


by: theahura

I was able to get Claude to do this, though it kinda sorta cheated. Blog post describing the output here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theahura.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;i-successfully-recreated-the-1996" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theahura.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;i-successfully-recreated-the...</a><p>TLDR:<p>&quot;The plan is designed to ‘autoformalize’ the problem by using Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is incredibly important for getting good outputs from a coding agent, because it helps solve the context rot problem. Specifically, if you can write a good test when the model is most ‘lucid’, it will have an easier time later on because it is just solving the test instead of ‘building a feature’ or whatever high dimensional ask you originally gave it.<p>From here, Nori chugged away for the better part of half an hour in yolo mode while I went to do other things. And eventually I got a little pop up notification saying that it was done. It had written a playwright test that would open an html file, screenshot it, diff it with the original screenshot, and output the final result...<p>After trying a few ways to get the stars to line up perfectly, it just gave up and copied the screenshot in as the background image, then overlaid the rest of the HTML elements on top.<p>I’m tempted to give this a pass for a few reasons.<p>This obviously covers the original use case that tripped up Jonah.<p>It also is basically exactly what I asked the model to do — that is, give me a pixel perfect representation — so it’s kind of my fault that I was not clearer.<p>I’m not sure the model actually can get to pixel perfect any other way. The screengrab has artifacts. After all, I basically just used the default linux screenshot selection tool to get the original output, without even paying much attention to the width of the image.<p>If you ask the model to loosen the requirements for the exact screengrab, it does the right thing, but the pixel alignment <i>is</i> slightly off. The model included this as index_tiled.html in the repo, and you can see the pixel diff in one of the output images...&quot;

12/8/2025, 9:26:13 AM


by: 960design

Claude argued with me about the quadratic equation the other day. It vehemently felt a -c was required whereas a c was the correct answer. I pointed this out showing step by step and it finally agreed. I tried Grok to see if it could get it right. Nope, the exact same response as Claude, but Grok never backed down; even after the step by step explanation of the maths.

12/7/2025, 9:15:41 PM


by: shortformblog

Claude can&#x27;t properly count the number of characters in a sentence. It&#x27;s asking a lot to assume it can get pixel perfect.

12/7/2025, 8:45:34 PM


by: ajasmin

I&#x27;m actually surprised Claude was about to do that much.<p>I hadn&#x27;t even considered handing it a visual mockup to work from. Event though that workflow is par for the course for any web design team.<p>I would assume there must be at least some prior work into locating individual assets in a larger canvas. It just needs to be integrated into the pipeline.

12/8/2025, 5:05:56 AM


by: pluc

I like how the author calls a script on the internet &quot;him&quot;.

12/7/2025, 7:18:19 PM


by: stwsk

&gt;Look, I still need this Space Jam website recreated.<p>Now that&#x27;s a novel sentence if I&#x27;ve ever read one.

12/7/2025, 8:09:55 PM


by: handedness

A site in &#x27;96 would have been built largely with tables, not CSS. CSS didn&#x27;t become a thing until a couple of years later.<p>I know this because I&#x27;m still salty about the transition. For all of CSS&#x27;s advantages, we lost something when we largely moved away from tables.

12/8/2025, 4:35:18 AM


by: 1970-01-01

This is a great under the radar test for AI. I would put money on it failing to recreate the majority of 90s movie websites as it wasn&#x27;t trained on them. The old cowboy webmasters that built and ultimately abandoned them didn&#x27;t write many books on the topic.

12/8/2025, 4:34:27 AM


by: victorbuilds

Building something similar - using Claude API to generate mini games from text descriptions (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codorex.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codorex.com</a>, still pretty rough).<p>Can confirm: Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts, but spatial precision is a constant battle. Anything involving exact pixel positions needs validation&#x2F;correction layers on top.<p>The suggestion upthread about having it write its own measurement tools seems promising - haven&#x27;t tried that approach yet.

12/7/2025, 9:50:26 PM


by: mr_windfrog

Maybe we could try asking Claude to generate code using &lt;table&gt;, &lt;tr&gt;, &lt;td&gt; for layout instead of relying on div + CSS. Feels like it could simplify things a lot.<p>Would this actually work, or am I missing something?

12/8/2025, 2:51:57 AM


by: simonw

I wonder if Gemini 3 Pro would do better at this particular test? They&#x27;re very proud of its spatial awareness and vision abilities.

12/7/2025, 8:54:17 PM


by: Aeolun

I think claude could have easily used a script to calculate the positions of the planets exactly here, instead of trying to use the frankly horrible image recognition.

12/7/2025, 10:25:09 PM


by: nickdothutton

I have recently been working on something &quot;fun&quot; in the terminal that mingles plain ASCII, ANSI &quot;graphics&quot;, actual bitmaps (Sixel), and Nerdfonts in a TUI framework (Charm etc). After a week of smashing Claude&#x27;s head against a wall, which is better than smashing my own, I&#x27;ve had to significantly alter my hopes and expectations.

12/7/2025, 8:13:43 PM


by: rickcarlino

I look forward to an alternative reality where AI vendors race to have the model with the best Space Jam Bench scores.

12/7/2025, 9:32:19 PM


by: vmg12

We don&#x27;t know how to build it anymore

12/7/2025, 8:00:28 PM


by: manmal

I would put Claude into a loop and let it make screenshots itself, diffing them against the original screenshot, until it has found the right arrangement at the planets‘ starting position (pixel perfect match).

12/7/2025, 10:18:31 PM


by: syassami

We&#x27;ve lost the capability to build such marvels.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;my-father-in-law-is-a-builder-we-cant-we-dont-know-how-to-do-it" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;my-father-in-law-is-a-builder...</a>

12/7/2025, 7:10:09 PM


by: johnfn

Context is king. The problem is that you are the one currently telling Claude how close it is and what to do next. But if you give it the tools to do that itself, it will make a world of difference.<p>Give Claude a way to iteratively poke at what it created (such as a playwright harness), and screenshot of what you want, and maybe a way to take a screenshot in Playwright and I think you will get much closer. You might even be able to one shot it.<p>I’ve always wondered what would happen if I gave it a screenshot and told it to iterate until the Playwright screenshot matched the mock screenshot, pixel perfect. I imagine it would go nuts, but after a few hours I think it would likely get it. (Either that or minor font discrepancies and rounding errors would cause it to give up…)

12/7/2025, 8:37:46 PM


by: jacobsenscott

&gt; here&#x27;s no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot<p>And<p>&gt; I&#x27;m an engineering manager<p>I can&#x27;t tell if this is an intentional or unintentional satire of the current state of AI mandates from management.

12/7/2025, 7:40:06 PM


by: bdcravens

A comparison would Codex would be good. I haven&#x27;t done it with Codex, but when working through problems using ChatGPT, it does a great job when given screenshots.

12/7/2025, 6:33:10 PM


by: RagnarD

Why not just feed it the actual instructions that create the site - the page source code, the HTML, CSS, JS if any?

12/7/2025, 9:47:28 PM


by: subleq

What if you gave it an image comparison tool that would xor two screenshots to check its work?

12/7/2025, 11:50:40 PM


by: sema4hacker

&gt; The total payload is under 200KB.<p>Just out of curiosity, how big was what you considered Claude&#x27;s best attempt to be?

12/7/2025, 9:06:03 PM


by: micromacrofoot

I wouldn&#x27;t call it entirely defeated, it got maybe 90% of the way there. Before LLMs you couldn&#x27;t get 50% of the way there in an automated way.<p>&gt; What he produces<p>I feel like personifying LLMs more than they currently are is a mistake people make (though humans always do this), they&#x27;re not entities, they don&#x27;t know anything. If you treat them too human you might eventually fool yourself a little too much.

12/7/2025, 6:26:08 PM


by: isoprophlex

I have a very weird tangential nit to pick: gendering LLMs. I swear I&#x27;m not pushing any sort of gender agenda&#x2F;discussion that can be had anytime anywhere else in the current age, but to me there is something quintessentially a-gendered about the output of a computer program.<p>Calling Claude (or GPT-5 or Gemini or my bash terminal for that matter) a &quot;he&quot; seems absurd to the point of hilarity.<p>In my mind, they&#x27;ve always firmly been &quot;it&quot;s.

12/7/2025, 8:23:21 PM


by: neuroelectron

My web-dev friend saw the original Space Jam site. I asked him what it would cost to build something like that today. He paused and said:<p>We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.

12/7/2025, 10:24:30 PM


by: hestefisk

Would be interesting to see whether Gemini could crack this problem.

12/7/2025, 7:31:09 PM


by:

12/7/2025, 7:14:51 PM


by: zitterbewegung

In actual workflows someone would accept a very close reproduction and fix the small issues. Generally I use systems to get close enough to a scaffolding and &#x2F; or make small incremental improvements and direct its design

12/7/2025, 6:25:47 PM


by: phplovesong

This basically boils down to AI being unable to &quot;center a div&quot;. I see this very often, AI generated slop is has LOTS of &quot;off by one&quot; kind of bugs.

12/8/2025, 7:31:49 AM


by: yieldcrv

Skill issue

12/8/2025, 12:23:29 AM


by: fortyseven

Look at that stupid dog. It&#x27;s reading a book, but it&#x27;s really trashy YA. It&#x27;s not even Shakespeare. Dogs are stupid.

12/7/2025, 7:54:34 PM


by: iwontberude

Apropos given Warner Brothers Discovery just sold to Netflix

12/7/2025, 7:33:26 PM


by: thenumpaduser

We are actually spoiled at this point.

12/7/2025, 8:56:47 PM


by: supern0va

Honestly, if you had showed this article to me even eighteen months ago, I would have been blown away at how good of a job Claude did.<p>It&#x27;s remarkable how high our expectations have been steadily creeping.

12/7/2025, 6:10:18 PM


by: stonecharioteer

I&#x27;m curious. Did you ask it to use tables and no CSS?<p>In 1996, We had only css1. Ask it to use tables to do this, perhaps.

12/7/2025, 5:54:41 PM


by: a-dub

maybe ask it to use 1990s table based layout approaches?

12/7/2025, 7:10:41 PM


by: system2

Use Claude for Python. That&#x27;s it. Don&#x27;t push it for the frontend, it won&#x27;t do well.

12/8/2025, 1:25:03 AM


by: vrighter

&quot;there is no other way to preserve it&quot;<p>Bullshit. Right click -&gt; view source<p>Or just press ctrl+s and the browser will also gather all the assets into a folder for you.<p>The arrogance of thinking that the only way you know how is the only way....<p>You literally forgot the save feature all browsers have just because you set out to &quot;solve&quot; this using &quot;ai&quot;

12/8/2025, 5:27:52 AM


by: computersuck

Why not just host a copy from waybackmachine?

12/7/2025, 9:39:11 PM


by: BiteCode_dev

Tell claude to put the screenshot as an centered image with the body having the starry background on repeat. Then define the links as boxes over each icons with an old little tech trick called an image map.<p>Common at the time before flash took over.

12/7/2025, 11:01:37 PM


by: Madmallard

I wrote a 20,000 line multiplayer battle-arena game in XNA back in 2015 with manually coded physics (so everything is there in the code) and have tried several times with Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and GPT to translate it to JavaScript.<p>They all fail massively 100% of the time. Even if I break it down into chunks once they get to the chunks that matter the most (i.e. physics, collision detection and resolution, event handling and game logic) they all break down horribly and no amount of prompting back and forth will fix it.

12/7/2025, 9:41:14 PM


by: tehjoker

Hmm you note that the problem is the LLM doesn’t have enough image context, but then zoom the image more?<p>Why not downscale the image and feed it as a second input so that entire planets fit into a patch and instruct it to use the doensampled image for coarse coordinate estimation

12/7/2025, 9:07:39 PM


by: DocTomoe

I keep wondering ... is this a good benchmark? What is a practical use-case for the skills Claude is supposed to present here? And if the author needs that particular website re-created with pixel-perfect accuracy, woulnd&#x27;t it me simpler to just to it yourself?<p>Sure, you can argue this is some sort of modern ACID-Test - but the ACID tests checked for real-world use-cases. This feels more like &#x27;I have this one very specific request, the machine doesn&#x27;t perfectly fullfill it, so the machine is at fault.&#x27;. Complaining from a high pedestal.<p>I&#x27;m more surprised at how close Claude got in its reimagined SpaceJam-site.

12/7/2025, 8:56:50 PM


by: th0ma5

I personally don&#x27;t understand why asking these things to do things we know they can&#x27;t do is supposed to be productive. Maybe for getting around restrictions or fuzzing... I don&#x27;t see it as an effective benchmark unless it can link directly to the ways the models are being improved, but, to look at random results that sometimes are valid and think more iterations of randomness will eventually give way to <i>control</i> is a maddening perspective to me, but perhaps I need better language to describe this.

12/7/2025, 7:32:15 PM


by: Tokkemon

Why do I feel like the old man yelling at clouds that programmers refuse to use their brains anymore?

12/7/2025, 11:33:49 PM


by: computersuck

this is just AI brainrot disease<p>Help, I can&#x27;t recreate a website with AI! There&#x27;s no other way, no way I could fix up some HTML code! Believe me, I&#x27;m an engineering manager with a computer science degree!<p>Absolutely disgusting.

12/7/2025, 9:47:47 PM


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12/7/2025, 10:04:08 PM


by: animanoir

[dead]

12/8/2025, 3:38:14 AM


by: 486sx33

[dead]

12/7/2025, 7:44:43 PM


by: tyiz

[dead]

12/8/2025, 3:50:09 AM


by: koreanguy

[dead]

12/7/2025, 6:43:04 PM


by: djaowjxj

[flagged]

12/7/2025, 11:57:24 PM


by: throwaway314155

Somehow I suspect Claude Code (in an interactive session with trial, error, probing, critiquing, perusing, and all the other benefits you get) would do better. This example seems to assume Claude can do things in &quot;one shot&quot; (even the later attempts all seem to conceal information like it&#x27;s a homework assignment).<p>That&#x27;s not how to successfully use LLM&#x27;s for coding in my experience. It is however perhaps a good demonstration of Claude&#x27;s poor spatial reasoning skills. Another good demonstration of this is the twitch.tv&#x2F;ClaudePlaysPokemon where Claude has been failing to beat pokemon for months now.

12/7/2025, 6:00:45 PM


by: dreadnip

Why involve an LLM in this? Just download the site?

12/7/2025, 6:12:08 PM


by: johncoatesdev

You last-minute cancelled coffee with your friends to work on this? I&#x27;m not sure how I would feel if a friend did that to me.

12/7/2025, 6:57:56 PM


by: docheinestages

&gt; Note: please help, because I&#x27;d like to preserve this website forever and there&#x27;s no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot.<p>Why not use wget to mirror the website? Unless you&#x27;re being sarcastic.<p>$ wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;example.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;example.org</a><p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superuser.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;970323&#x2F;using-wget-to-copy-website-with-proper-layout-for-offline-browsing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superuser.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;970323&#x2F;using-wget-to-copy-we...</a>

12/7/2025, 7:23:40 PM