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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

(j0nah.com)
549 points thecr0w | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 17:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sigseg1v ◴[07 Dec 25 18:20 UTC] No.46183772[source]▶
Curious if you've tested something such as:

- "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"

- "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."

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Aurornis ◴[07 Dec 25 19:09 UTC] No.46184167[source]▶
This is my experience with using LLMs for complex tasks: If you're lucky they'll figure it out from a simple description, but to get most things done the way you expect requires a lot of explicit direction, test creation, iteration, and tokens.

One of the keys to being productive with LLMs is learning how to recognize when it's going to take much more effort to babysit the LLM into getting the right result as opposed to simply doing the work yourself.

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1. jazzyjackson ◴[07 Dec 25 23:04 UTC] No.46186280[source]▶
Re: tokens, there is a point where you have to decide what's worth it to you. I'd been unimpressed with what I could get out of chat apps but when I wanted to do a rails app that would cost me thousands in developer time and some weeks between communication zoom meetings and iteration... I bit the bullet and kept topping up Claude API and spent about $500 on Opus over the course of a weekend, but the site is done and works great.