I Successfully Recreated the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude
29 comments
·December 8, 2025johnfn
theahura
Note that I didn't even it tell it to use a pixel diff. Claude w/ Nori did that on its own by following the Nori TDD skill. I did very little, I'm actually very lazy :D
stanac
There is a quote about lazy developers, but I too lazy to search for it.
simlevesque
There's a lot of LLM haters, simple as that.
null
Aldipower
It is a task that could be _easily_ done manually in much shorter time without AI, probably by developers who even love to develop. The reaction on this shouldn't be misjudged as anti-AI. A lot of people, including me, just do not get it! For scientific purposes? Ok, fair enough. But what is the further meaning of this exercise?
johnfn
The point is that if we agree that this task is truly a one shot, as long as you agree it’s faster to prompt than code, then while you “easily” do this task in around an hour (or however long you say it will take you), I’ll prompt Claude in around 5 minutes, and get a few more things done while I let it run in the background. What am I missing from your argument?
Aldipower
Reading the blog post, prompting Claude setting up Playwright etc. takes at least one hour maybe more? Not seeing where your 5 minutes coming from.
null
BearOso
It's seemingly an experiment to see how an LLM performs when the task is just outside of its milieu. The answer is not very well.
thecr0w
Hey! You did it! I'm going to update my original blog post linking this one.
gnabgib
Related yesterday: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude (500 points, 409 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183294
5555624
Which is what prompted him to try creating it.
theahura
https://tilework-tech.github.io/space-jam/
The site claude made is live on github pages now too, enjoy
xnx
Might Google Antigravity be able to do this right out of the box? I believe it has a browser that can take screenshots.
Aldipower
Wow, that is complex stuff! In the meantime I could have recreated this twice manually. :-D
Philpax
Please record a video of doing such - I suspect it may take more active effort than you suspect :-)
Aldipower
It would be a funny thing with some surprises, that is for sure. :-D But, I still remember how to do good table designs, so I think I could manage it fairly quick. (Last words of a web developer..) :-)
QuantumNomad_
Do it, and write a blog post about it:
I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam website twice, without using any LLMs
:p
Aldipower
:-D Haha, that's a good one.
simojo
I see this as a logical rebuttal
bethekidyouwant
When do we start putting the prompt we used in the commit message?
theahura
There were a few prompts that went into a single commit so that doesn't quite make sense in this case. I posted the transcript, both in the original jsonl format and in markdown
I wrote a comment saying that this should be possible with a proper playwright harness and screenshot taking. My comment ended up in the negatives (though curiously no one stopped to explain why), as if I was saying something so absurdly inaccurate that it wasn’t even worth rebutting. Thank you for actually running the experiment and proving it - I was almost annoyed enough to do it myself.
I couldn’t understand why it had happened - it felt about as logical to my mind as writing a comment that Rust was faster than Node. I feel there is a strong anti-AI sentiment here, to the point that people will ignore evidence presented directly to them.
Personal vendetta aside, I enjoyed this post! You had some clever tricks I wouldn’t have considered. In fact, the idea of producing a pixel diff as output was particularly imaginative. And the bit about autoformalization definitely hits on something I’ve been feeling when working with AI recently.
EDIT: I notice my comment yesterday is in the positives. Please don’t vote it up. That was not my intention here.