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:
vunderba•1h ago
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
tkgally•1h ago
I agree that Claude did tend to repeat certain themes. If someone wanted to extend the gallery to the thousands of clocks while maintaining the variety, they would probably need to seed the model with some original ideas. (Whether those ideas could come from a model or would need human taste is an interesting question.)
Also, Claude’s realizations of some of its ideas are a bit rough. If I wanted to create a standalone widget for a clock I particularly liked, I would spend more time with Claude (or another model) refining and polishing it first.
Nevertheless, considering that nearly all the ideas came from Opus and all the graphics are created with pure code, I remain impressed with what it was able to do.