I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

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.

Side note: As a person who started using a mac since march, I found phoenix slides really good.

> Ok, so here is an interesting case where Claude was almost good enough, but not quite.

You say that as if that’s uncommon.

This should be the strap line for all AI (so far)

That's fair. But I always think of it as an intern I am paying $20 a month for or $200 a month. I would be kind of shocked if they could do everything as well as I'd hoped for that price point. It's fascinating for me and worth the money.

I am lucky that I don't depend on this for work at a corporation. I'd be pulling my hair out if some boss said "You are going to be doing 8 times as much work using our corporate AI from now on."

It is! I was really just curious if I could update this old codebase without getting my hands dirty.

Don get me wrong, doing 80% of my work for me is still great. And I’m actually quite glad I’m still needed for the other 20%

The problem is that your intern in this case is doing 1600% of the work, and now it’s your job to find and remove that extra 1520% so that you’re left with something usable.

Interesting. I switched to the Mac in 2005, and what I missed the most was the fact that in windows you could double click an image and then tap the left and right keys to browse other photos in the same folder. I learned objective c and made an app for it back then, but never published. I guess the jpegview fulfilled a similar purpose.

I switched to Mac in 2008. I forget if the featured existed back then, but today on macOS if you press spacebar on an image in Finder to preview, you can use the arrow keys to browse other photos.

Right. They introduced quick look soon after, but still not ideal. If you interact with the finder in any way, “quicklooked” item changes.