Show 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: https://github.com/tkgally/500-clocks/tree/main
Discussion Highlights (1 comments)
vunderba
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