Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however:
"The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.".
This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a thing back then...
Here was its one-shot attempt at building the same type of layout (table based) with a screenshot and assets as input: https://i.imgur.com/fhdOLwP.png
You bet, Fun post and writeup, took me a bit down memory lane. I built several sites with nested table-based layouts, 1x1 transparent gif files set to strange widths to get layouts to force certain sizes. Little tricks with repeating gradient backgrounds for fancy 'beveled' effects. Under construction GIFs, page counters, GUESTBOOKS!, Photoshop drop-shadows on everything. All the things, fond-times. One or two I haven't touched in 20 years, but keep online for my own time-capsule memory :)
The failure mode here (Claude trying to satisfy rather than saying 'this is impossible with the constraints') shows up everywhere. We use it for security research - it'll keep trying to find exploits even when none exist rather than admit defeat. The key is building external validation (does the POC actually work?) rather than trusting the LLM's confidence.
Ah! I see the problem now! AI can't see shit, it's a statistical model not some form of human. It uses words, so like humans, it can say every shit it wants and it's true until you find out.
The number one rule of the internet is don't believe anything you read. This rule was lost in history unfortunately.
When reasoning about sufficiently complex mechanisms, you benefit from adopting the Intentional Stance regardless of whether the thing on the other side is "some form of human". For example, when I'm planning a competitive strategy, I'm reasoning about how $OTHER_FIRM might respond to my pricing changes, without caring whether there's a particular mental process on the other side
I remember building really complex layouts w nested tables, and learning the hard way that going beyond 6 levels of nesting caused serious rendering performance problems in Netscape.
I remember seeing a co-worker stuck on trying to debug Netscape showing a blank page. When I looked at it, it wasn’t showing a blank page per se, it was just taking over a minute to render tables nested twelve deep. I deleted exactly half of them with no change to the layout or functionality, and it immediately started rendering in under a second.
Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables.
As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.
Upromise. com -- a service for helping families save $ for college. Those layouts, which I painstakingly hand-crafted in HTML, caused the CTO to say "I didn't know you could do that with HTML", and was served to the company's first 10M customers.
That's a fun trick, but please consider adding ARIA roles (e.g. role="presentation" to <table>, role="heading" aria-level="[number]" to the <font> elements used for headings) to make your site understandable by screen readers.
I'm on Firefox and when I right click and open image in new tab I see an svg file with pale blue text colour and cut-off lettering. The source of the svg suggests that the letters are drawn paths rather than a font.
Saving the svg file down and loading into Inkscape shows a grouped object with a frame and then letter forms. The letter forms are not fonts but a complete drawn path. So I think the chopping off of the descenders is a deliberate choice (which is fine if that is what's wanted).
The whole page looks narrow and long on my landfill android phone so the content is in the middle third of the browser but can pinch-zoom ok onto each 'cell' or section of text or the graphs.
Thanks to tirreno and reconnecting for posting this interesting page markup.
Responsive layout would be the biggest reason (mobile for one, but also a wider range of PC monitor aspect ratios these days than the 4:3 that was standard back then), probably followed by conflating the exact layout details with the content, and a separation of concerns / ease of being able to move things around.
I mean, it's a perfectly viable thing if these are not requirements and preferences that you and your system have. But it's pretty rare these days that an app or site can say "yeah, none of those matter to me the least bit".
It was relatively OK to deal with when the pages were created by coders themselves.
But then DreamWeaver came out, where you basically drew the entire page in 2D and it spat out some HTML tables that stitched it all back together again, and the freedom it gave our artists in drawing in 2D and not worrying about the output meant they went completely overboard with it and you'd get lots of tiny little slices everywhere.
Definitely glad those days are well behind us now!
wasn't it Fireworks that sliced the image originally. you'd then be able to open that export into Dreamworks for additional work. I didn't do that kind of design very long. Did Dreamworks get updated to allow the slicing directly bypassing Fireworks?
You jest, but it took forever to add somewhat intuitive layout mechanism to css which allowed you to do what could be done easily with html tables. Vertically centering a div inside another was really hard, and very few people understood the techniques you would use, instead of blindly copying them.
It was beyond irony that the recommended solution was to tell the browser to render your divs as a table.
The author said he had the assets and gave them to Claude. It would be obvious if he had one large image for all the planets instead of individual ones.
Off topic, but you have used imgur as your image hosting site, which cannot be viewed in the UK. If you want all readers to be able to see and understand your points, please could you use a more universally reachable host?
Have done multiple times. Im not asking op to change, just to consider ther may be a large chunk of readers who cant see what they are referencing if they choose Imgur.
Please, let us import this ban into the US. The site hasn't been usable in almost ten years, but people keep insisting on dragging the corpse back out the grave.
Yes tried that. Getting a new government was a bit tricky and work policy doesnt allow personal VPNs, so was just letting OP know that if they choose to use Imgur then a large chunk of the readers wont know what they are talking about.
Why is what? The post is fully self explanitory. If the OP chooses to use Imgur, then a large chunk of the readers will not know what they are talking about.
Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM.
On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don't support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn't let Claude write the code.
With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:
- Read an .icc file from disk
- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)
- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs
The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).
Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
Certainly if a human wrote code that solved this problem, and a second human copied and tweaked it slightly for their use case, we would have a word for them.
Would we use the same word if two different humans wrote code that solved two different problems, but one part of each problem was somewhat analogous to a different aspect of a third human's problem, and the third human took inspiration from those parts of both solutions to create code that solved a third problem?
What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
I think "plagiarism", "inspiration", and just "learning from" fall on some continuous spectrum. There are clear differences when you zoom out, but they are in degree, and it's hard to set a hard boundary. The key is just to make sure we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created.
Ask for something like "a first person shooter using software rendering", and search github for the function names for the rendering functions. Using Copilot I found code simply lifted from implementations of Doom, except that "int" was replaced with "int32_t" and similar.
It's also fun to tell Copilot that the code will violate a license. It will seemingly always tell you it's fine. Safe legal advice.
2a) Second-order plagiarism of written text would be replacing words with synonyms. Or taking a book paragraph by paragraph and for each one of them, rephrasing it in your own words. Yes, it might fool automated checkers but the structure would still be a copy of the original book. And most importantly, it would not contain any new information. No new positive-sum work was done. It would have no additional value.
Before LLMs almost nobody did this because the chance that it would help in a lawsuit vs the amount of work was not a good tradeoff. Now it is. But LLMs can do "better":
2b) A different kind of second-order plagiarism is using multiple sources and plagiarizing each of them only in part. Find multiple books on the same topic, take 1 chapter from each and order them in a coherent manner. Make it more granular. Find paragraphs or phrases which fit into the structure of your new book but are verbatim from other books. See how granular you can make it.
The trick here is that doing this by hand is more work than just writing your own book. So nobody did it and copyright law does not really address this well. But with LLMs, it can be automated. You can literally instruct an LLM to do this and it will do it cheaper than any human could. However, how LLMs work internally is yet different:
n) Higher-order plagiarism is taking multiple source books, identifying patterns, and then reproducing them in your "new" book.
If the patterns are sufficiently complex, nobody will ever be able to prove what specifically you did. What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data.
The point is this ability to detect and reproduce patterns is an impressive innovation but it's built on top of the work of hundreds of millions[0] of humans whose work was used without consent. The work done by those employed by the LLM companies is minuscule compared to that. Yet all of the reward goes to them.
Not to mention LLMs completely defear the purpose of (A)GPL. If you can take AGPL code and pass it through a sufficiently complex mechanical transformation that the output does the same thing but copyright no longer applies, then free software is dead. No more freedom to inspect and modify.
If a human did 2a or 2b we would think that a larger infraction than (1) because it shows intent to obfuscate the origins.
As for your free software is dead argument: I think it is worse than that: it takes away the one payment that free software authors get: recognition. If a commercial entity can take the code, obfuscate it and pass it off as their own copyrighted work to then embrace and extend it then that is the worst possible outcome.
Good point. Reminds me of how if you poison one person, you go to prison, but when a company poisons thousands, it gets a fine... sometimes.
> it takes away the one payment that free software authors get: recognition
I keep flip-flopping on this. I did most of my open source work not caring about recognition but about the principles of GPL and later AGPL. However, I came to realize it was a mistake - people don't judge you by the work you actually do but by the work you appear to do. I have zero respect for people who do something just for the approval of others but I am aware of the necessity of making sure people know your value.
One thing is certain: credit/recognition affect all open source code, user rights (e.g. to inspect and modify) affect only the subset under (A)GPL.
You make several good points, and I appreciate that they appear well thought out.
> What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data.
At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently?
> then free software is dead. No more freedom to inspect and modify.
It seems to me that depends on the ideological framing. Consider a (still entirely hypothetical) world where anyone can receive approximately any software they wish with little more than a Q&A session with an expert AI agent. Rather than free software being dead, such a scenario would appear to obviate the vast majority of needs that free software sets out to serve in the first place.
It seems a bit like worrying that free access to a comprehensive public transportation service would kill off a ride sharing service. It probably would, and the end result would also probably be a net benefit to humanity.
> At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently?
Copyright law... automated transformation preserves copyright. It makes the output a derivative of the input.
Yes that's what the law currently says. I'm asking if it ought to say that in this specific scenario.
Previously there was no way for a machine to do large swaths of things that have now recently become possible. Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.
This is the first technology in human history which only works if you use an exorbitant amount of other people's work (without their consent, often without even their knowledge) to automate their work.
There have been previous tech revolutions but they were based on independent innovation.
> Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.
Perhaps using copyright law for software and other engineering work might have been a mistake but it worked to a degree me and most devs were OK with.
Sidenote: There is no _one_ copyright law. IANAL but reportedly, for example datasets are treated differently in the US vs EU, with greater protection for the work that went into creating a database in the EU. And of course, China does what is best for China at a given moment.
There's 2 approaches:
1) Either we follow the current law. Its spirit and (again IANAL) probably the letter says that mechanical transformation preserves copyright. Therefore the LLMs and their output must be licensed under the same license as the training data (if all the training data use compatible licenses) or are illegal (if they mixed incompatible licenses). The consequence is that very roughly a) most proprietary code cannot be used for training, b) using only permissive code gives you a permissively licensed model and output and c) permissive and copyleft code can be combined, as long as the resulting model and output is copyleft. It still completely ignores attribution though but this is a compromise I would at least consider being OK with.
(But if I don't get even credit for 10 years of my free work being used to build this innovation, then there should be a limit on how much the people building the training algorithms get out of it as well.)
2) We design a new law. Legality and morality are, sadly, different and separate concepts. Now, call me a naive sucker, but I think legality should try to approximate morality as closely as possible, only deviating due to the real-world limitations of provability. (E.g. some people deserve to die but the state shouldn't have the right to kill them because the chance of error is unacceptably high.) In practice, the law is determined by what the people writing it can get away with before the people forced to follow it revolt. I don't want a revolution, but I think for example a bloody revolution is preferable to slavery.
Either way, there are established processes for handling both violations of laws and for writing new laws. This should not be decided by private for-profit corporations seeing whether they can get away with it scot-free or trembling that they might have to pay a fine which is a near-zero fraction of their revenue, with almost universally no repercussions for their owners.
> What justifies treating human output differently?
Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not.
One angle:
The real issue is how this is made possible. Imagine an AI being created by a lone genius or a team of really good programmers and researchers by sitting down and just writing the code. From today's POV, it would be almost unimaginably impressive but that is how most people envisioned AI being created a few decades ago (and maybe as far as 5 years ago). These people would obviously deserve all the credit for their invaluable work and all the income from people using their work. (At least until another team does the same, then it's competition as normal.)
But that's not how AI is being created. What the programmers and researchers really do it create a highly advanced lossy compression algorithm which then takes nearly all publicly available human knowledge (disregarding licenses/consent) and creates a model of it which can reproduce both the first-order data (duh) and the higher-order patterns in it (cool). Do they still deserve all the credit and all the income? What if there's 1k researchers and programmers working on the compression algorithm (= training algorithm) and 1B people whose work ("content") is compressed by it (= used to train it). I will freely admit that the work done to build the algorithm is higher skilled than most of the work done by the 1B people. Maybe even 10x or 100x more expensive. But if you multiply those numbers (1k * 100 vs 1B), you have to come to the conclusion that the 1B people deserve the vast majority of the credit and the vast majority of the income generated by the combined work. (And notice when another team creates a competing model based on the same data, the share by the 1B stays the same and the 1k have to compete for their fraction.)
Another angle:
If you read a book, learn something from it and then apply the knowledge to make money, you currently don't pay a share to the author of the book. But you paid a fixed price for the book, hopefully. We could design a system where books are available for free, we determine how much the book helped you make that money, and you pay a proportional share to the author. This is not as entirely crazy as it might sound. When you cause an injury to someone, a court will determine how much each party involved is liable and there are complex rules (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_and_several_liability) determining the subsequent exchange of money. We could in theory do the same for material you learn from (though the fractions would probably be smaller than 1%). We don't because it would be prohibitively time consuming, very invasive, and often unprovable unless you (accidentally) praise a specific blog post or say you learned a technique from a book. Instead, we use this thing called market capitalism where the author sets a price and people either buy the book or not (depending on whether they think it's worth it for them), some of them make no money as a result, some make a lot, and we (choose to) believe that in aggregate, the author is fairly compensated.
Even if your blog is available for anyone to read freely, you get compensated in alternative ways by people crediting you and/or by building an audience you can influence to a degree.
With LLMs, there is no way to get the companies training the models to credit you or build you an audience. And even if they pay for the books they use for training, I don't believe they pay enough. The price was determined before the possibility of LLM training was known to the author and the value produced by a sufficiently sophisticated AI, perhaps AGI (which they openly claim to want to create) is effectively unlimited. The only way to compensate authors fairly is to periodically evaluate how much revenue the model attracted and pay a dividend to the authors as long as that model continues to be used.
Best of all, unlike with humans, the inner workings of a computer model, even a very complex one, can be analyzed in their entirety. So it should be possible to track (fractional) attribution throughout the whole process. There's just no incentive for the companies to invest into the tooling.
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> approximately any software they wish with little more than a Q&A session with an expert AI agent
Making software is not just about writing code, it's about making decisions. Not just understanding problem and designing a solution but also picking tradeoffs and preferences.
I don't think most people are gonna do this just like most people today don't go to a program's settings and tweak every slider/checkbox/dropdown to their liking. They will at most say they want something exactly like another program with a few changes. And then it's clearly based on that original program and all the work performed to find out the users' preferences/likes/dislikes/workflows which remain unchanged.
But even if they genuinely recreate everything, then if it's done by an LLM, it's still based on work of others as per the argument above.
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> the end result would also probably be a net benefit to humanity.
Possibly. But in the case of software fully written by sufficiently advanced LLMs, that net benefit would be created only by using the work of a hundred million or possibly a billion of people for free and without (quite often against) their consent.
Forced work without compensation is normally called slavery. (The only difference is that our work has already been done and we're "only" forced to not be able to prevent LLM companies from using it despite using licenses which by their intent and by the logic above absolutely should.)
The real question is how to achieve this benefit without exploiting people.
And don't forget such a model will not be offered for free to everyone as a public good. Not even to those people whose data was used to train it. It will be offered as a paid service. And most of the revenue won't even go to the researchers and programmers who worked on the model directly and who made it possible. It will go to the people who contributed the least (often zero) technical work.
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This comment (and its GP), which contains arguments I have not seen anywhere else, was written over an hour long train ride. I could have instead worked remotely to make more than enough money to pay for the train ride. Instead, I write this training data which will be compressed and some patterns from it reproduced, allowing people I will never know and who will never know me to make an amount of money I have no chance quantifying and get nothing from. Now, I have to work some other hour to pay for the train ride. Make of that what you will.
Human time is certainly valuable to a particular human. However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine.
I think it's worth remembering that IP law is generally viewed (at least legally) as existing for the net benefit of society as opposed to for ethical reasons. Certainly many authors feel like they have (or ought to have) some moral right to control their work but I don't believe that was ever the foundation of IP law.
Nor do I think it should be! If we are to restrict people's actions (ex copying) then it should be for a clear and articulable net societal benefit. The value proposition of IP law is that it prevents degenerate behavior that would otherwise stifle innovation. My question is thus, how do these AI developments fit into that?
So I completely agree that (for example) laundering a full work more or less verbatim through an AI should not be permissible. But when it comes to the higher order transformations and remixes that resemble genuine human work I'm no longer certain. I definitely don't think that "human exceptionalism" makes for a good basis either legally or ethically.
Regarding FOSS licenses, I'm again asking how AI relates back to the original motivations. Why does FOSS exist in the first place? What is it trying to accomplish? A couple ideological motivations that come to mind are preventing someone building on top and then profiting, or ensuring user freedom and ability to tinker.
Yes, the current crop of AI tools seem to pose an ideological issue. However! That's only because the current iteration can't truly innovate and also (as you note) the process still requires lots of painstaking human input. That's a far cry from the hypothetical that I previously posed.
One of your remarks regarding attribution and compensation goes back to 'Xanadu' by the way, if you are not familiar with it that might be worth reading up on (Ted Nelson). He obviously did this well before the current AI age but a lot of the ideas apply.
A meta-comment:
I absolutely love your attention to detail in this discussion and avoiding taking 'the easy way out' from some of the more hairy concept embedded. This is exactly the kind of interaction that I love HN for, and it is interesting how this thread seems to bring out the best in you at the same time that it seems to bring out the worst in others.
Most likely they are responding as strongly as they do because they've bought into this matter to a degree that they are passing off works that they did not create as their own novel output, they got paid for it and they - like a religious person - are now so invested in this that it became their crutch and a part of their identity.
If you have another train ride to make I'd love for you to pick apart that argument and to refute it.
They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
but as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produce reasonable-looking output.
Programmers are not expected to add an addendum to every file listing all the books, articles, and conversations they've had that have influenced the particular code solution. LLMs are trained on far more sources that influence their code suggestions, but it seems like we actually want a higher standard of attribution because they (arguably) are incapable of original thought.
It's not uncommon, in a well-written code base, to see documentation on different functions or algorithms with where they came from.
This isn't just giving credit; it's valuable documentation.
If you're later looking at this function and find a bug or want to modify it, the original source might not have the bug, might have already fixed it, or might have additional functionality that is useful when you copy it to a third location that wasn't necessary in the first copy.
If the problem you ask it to solve has only one or a few examples, or if there are many cases of people copy pasting the solution, LLMs can and will produce code that would be called plagiarism if a human did it.
Do you have a source for that being the key difference? Where did you learn your words, I don’t see the names of your teachers cited here. The English language has existed a while, why aren’t you giving a citation every time you use a word that already exists in a lexicon somewhere? We have a name for people who don’t coin their own words for everything and rip off the words that other painstakingly evolved over a millennia of history. Find your own graphemes.
What a profoundly bad faith argument. We all understand that singular words are public domain, they belong to everyone. Yet when you arrange them in a specific pattern, of which there are infinite possibilities, you create something unique. When someone copies that arrangement wholesale and claims they were the first, that’s what we refer to as plagiarism.
It’s not bad faith argument. It’s an attempt to shake thinking that is profoundly stuck by taking that thinking to an absurd extreme. Until that’s done, quite a few people aren’t able to see past the assumptions they don’t know they making. And by quite a few people I mean everyone, at different times. A strong appreciation for the absurd will keep a person’s thinking much sharper.
>> They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
> [i want to] shake thinking that is profoundly stuck [because they] aren’t able to see past the assumptions they don’t know they making
what is profoundly stuck, and what are the assumptions?
Copyright isn't some axiom, but to quote wikipedia: "Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized."
It's a tool to incentivse human creative expression.
Thus it's entirely sensible to consider and treat the output from computers and humans differently.
Especially when you consider large differences between computers and humans, such as how trivial it is to create perfect duplicates of computer training.
It’s tiresome to see unexamined assumptions and self-contradictions tossed out by a community that can and often does do much better. Some light absurdism often goes further and makes clear that I’m not just trying to setup a strawman since I’ve already gone and made a parody of my own point.
RAG and LLMs are not the same thing, but 'Agents' incorporate both.
Maybe we could resolve the bit of a conundrum by the op in requiring 'agents' to give credit for things if they did rag them or pull them off the web?
It still doesn't resolve the 'inherent learning' problem.
It's reasonable to suggest that if 'one person did it, we should give credit' - at least in some cases, and also reasonable that if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply.
But a couple of considerations:
- It may not be that common for an LLM to 'see one thing one time' and then have such an accurate assessment of the solution. It helps, but LLMs tend not to 'learn' things that way.
- Some people might consider this the OSS dream - any code that's public is public and it's in the public domain. We don't need to 'give credit' to someone because they solved something relatively arbitrary - or - if they are concerned with that, then we can have a separate mechanism for that, aka they can put it on Github or Wikipedia even, and then we can worry about 'who thought of it first' as a separate consideration. But in terms of Engineering application, that would be a bit of a detractor.
> if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply.
I think it should.
Sure, if you make a small amount of money and divide it among the 1000 people who deserve credit due to their work being used to create ("train") the model, it might be too small to bother.
But if actual AGI is achieved, then it has nearly infinite value. If said AGI is built on top of the work of the 1000 people, then almost infinity divided by 1000 is still a lot of money.
Of course, the real numbers are way larger, LLMs were trained on the work of at least 100M but perhaps over a billion of people. But the value they provide over a long enough timespan is also claimed to be astronomical (evidenced by the valuations of those companies). It's not just their employees who deserve a cut but everyone whose work was used to train them.
> Some people might consider this the OSS dream
I see the opposite. Code that was public but protected by copyleft can now be reused in private/proprietary software. All you need to do it push it through enough matmuls and some nonlinearities.
- I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit - or certainly 'financial remuneration' because they wrote some arbitrary piece of code.
That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.
- Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical. Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft. It's a legit perspective obviously, but it hasn't bee representative for 20 years.
Whatever we do with AI, we already have a basic understanding of public domain, at least we can start from there.
> I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit
There's 8B people on the planet, probably ~100M can code to some degree[0]. Something only 1k people write is actually pretty rare.
Where would you draw the line? How many out of how many?
If I take a leaked bit of Google or MS or, god forbid, Oracle code and manage to find a variation of each small block in a few other projects, does it mean I can legally take the leaked code and use it for free?
Do you even realize to what lengths the tech companies went just a few years ago to protect their IP? People who ever even glanced at leaked code were prohibited from working on open source reimplementations.
> That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.
1) Public domain is a legal concept, it has 0 relevance to morality.
2) Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?
> Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical.
This sentence seems highly ideological. Linux is GPL, in fact, probably most SW on my non-work computer is GPL. It is very practical and works much better than commercial alternatives for me.
> Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft.
Where did you get this number? Using search engines, I get 20-30%.
[0]: It's the number of github users, though there's reportedly only ~25M professional SW devs, many more people can code but don't professionaly.
> What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
What if it was just a single person? I take it you didn't read any of the code in the ocaml vibe pr that was posted a bit ago? The one where Claude copied non just implementation specifics, but even the copyright headers from a named, specific person.
It's clear that you can have no idea if the magic black box is copying from a single source, or from many.
So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it. Are you really arguing that's ok?
> So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it.
It is actually worse: plagiarism is fine if I'm shielded from such claims by using a digital mixer. When criminals use crypto tumblers to hide their involvement we tend to see that as proof of intent, not as absolution.
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code.
Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
We can solve that question in an intuitive way: if human input is not what is driving the output then it would be sufficient to present it with a fraction of the current inputs, say everything up to 1970 and have it generate all of the input data from 1970 onwards as output.
If that does not work then the moment you introduce AI you cap their capabilities unless humans continue to create original works to feed the AI. The conclusion - to me, at least - is that these pieces of software regurgitate their inputs, they are effectively whitewashing plagiarism, or, alternatively, their ability to generate new content is capped by some arbitrary limit relative to the inputs.
This is known as the data processing inequality. Non-invertible functions can not create more information than what is available in their inputs: https://blog.blackhc.net/2023/08/sdpi_fsvi/. Whatever arithmetic operations are involved in laundering the inputs by stripping original sources & references can not lead to novelty that wasn't already available in some combination of the inputs.
Neural networks can at best uncover latent correlations that were already available in the inputs. Expecting anything more is basically just wishful thinking.
Using this reasoning, would you argue that a new proof of a theorem adds no new information that was not present in the axioms, rules of inference and so on?
If so, I'm not sure it's a useful framing.
For novel writing, sure, I would not expect much truly interesting progress from LLMs without human input because fundamentally they are unable to have human experiences, and novels are a shadow or projection of that.
But in math – and a lot of programming – the "world" is chiefly symbolic. The whole game is searching the space for new and useful arrangements. You don’t need to create new information in an information-theoretic sense for that. Even for the non-symbolic side (say diagnosing a network issue) of computing, AIs can interact with things almost as directly as we can by running commands so they are not fundamentally disadvantaged in terms of "closing the loop" with reality or conducting experiments.
Sound deductive rules of logic can not create novelty that exceeds the inherent limits of their foundational axiomatic assumptions. You can not expect novel results from neural networks that exceed the inherent information capacity of their training corpus & the inherent biases of the neural network (encoded by its architecture). So if the training corpus is semantically unsound & inconsistent then there is no reason to expect that it will produce logically sound & semantically coherent outputs (i.e. garbage inputs → garbage outputs).
Maybe? But it also seems like you are that you are not accounting for new information at inference time. Let's pretend I agree the LLM is a plagiarism machine that can produce no novelty in and of itself that didn't come from what it was trained on, and produces mostly garbage (I only half agree lol, and I think "novelty" is under-specified here).
When I apply that machine (with its giant pool of pirated knowledge) _to my inputs and context_ I can get results applicable to my modestly novel situation which is not in the training data. Perhaps the output is garbage. Naturally if my situation is way out of distribution I cannot expect very good results.
But I often don't care if the results are garbage some (or even most!) of the time if I have a way to ground-truth whether they are useful to me. This might be via running a compile, a test suite, a theorem prover or mk1 eyeball. Of course the name of the game is to get agents to do this themselves and this is now fairly standard practice.
I'm not here to convince you whether Markov chains are helpful for your use cases or not. I know from personal experience that even in cases where I have a logically constrained query I will receive completely nonsensical responses¹.
It does this all the time, but as often as not then outputs nonsense again, just different nonsense, and if you keep it running long enough it starts repeating previous errors (presumably because some sliding window is exhausted).
That's been my general experience and that was the most recent example. People keep forgetting that unless they can independently verify the outputs they are essentially paying OpenAI for the privilige of being very confidently gaslighted.
It would be a really nice exercise - for which I unfortunately do not have the time - to have a non-trivial conversation with the best models of the day and then to rigorously fact-check every bit of output to determine the output quality. Judging from my own (probably not a representative sample) experience it would be a very meager showing.
I use AI as a means of last resort only now and then mostly as a source of inspiration rather than a direct tool aiming to solve an issue. And like that it has been useful on occasion, but it has at least as often been a tremendous waste of time.
Theoretical "proofs" of limitations like this are always unhelpful because they're too broad, and apply just as well to humans as they do to LLMs. The result is true but it doesn't actually apply any limitation that matters.
You're confused about what applies to people & what applies to formal systems. You will continue to be confused as long as you keep thinking formal results can be applied in informal contexts.
That's true. But if we take your implied rebuttal then current level AI would be able to learn from current AI as well as it would learn from humans, just like humans learn from other humans. But so far that does not seem to be the case, in fact, AI companies do everything they can to avoid eating their own tail. They'd love eating their own tail if it was worth it.
To me that's proof positive they know their output is mangled inputs, they need that originality otherwise they will sooner or later drown in nonsense and noise. It's essentially a very complex game of Chinese whispers.
I think my track record belies your very low value and frankly cowardly comment. If you have something to say at least do it under your real username instead of a throwaway.
The whole "reproduces training data vebatim" is a red herring.
It reproduces _patterns from the training data_, sometimes including verbatim phrases.
The work (to discover those patterns, to figure out what works and what does not, to debug some obscure heisenbug and write a blog post about it, ...) was done by humans. Those humans should be compensated for their work, not owners of mega-corporations who found a loophole in copyright.
Pick up a book about programming from seventies or eighties that was unlikely to be scanned and feed into LLM. Take a task from it and ask LLM to write a program from it that even a student can solve within 10 minutes. If the problem was not really published before, LLM fails spectacularly.
This does not appear to be true. Six months ago I created a small programming language. I had LLMs write hundreds of small programs in the language, using the parser, interpreter, and my spec as a guide for the language. The vast majority of these programs were either very close or exactly what I wanted. No prior source existed for the programming language because I created it whole cloth days earlier.
Obviously you accidentally recreated a language from the 70s :P
(I created a template language for JSON and added branching and conditionals and realized I had a whole programming language. Really proud of my originality until i was reading Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines and found out I reinvented TRAC, and to some extent, XSLT. Anyway LLMs are very good at reasoning about it because it can be constrained by a JSON schema. People who think LLMs only regurgitate haven't given it a fair shot)
I think the key is that the LLM is having no trouble mapping from one "embedding" of the language to another (the task they are best performers at!), and that appears extremely intelligent to us humans, but certainly is not all there's to intelligence.
But just take a look at how LLMs struggle to handle dynamical, complex systems such as the "vending machine" paper published some time ago. Those kind of tasks, which we humans tend to think of as "less intelligent" than say, converting human language to a C++ implementation, seem to have some kind of higher (or at least, different) complexity than the embedding mapping done by LLMs. Maybe that's what we typically refer to as creativity? And if so, modern LLMs certainly struggle with that!
Quite sci-fi that we have created a "mind" so alien we struggle to even agree on the word to define what it's doing :)
It's telling that you can't actually provide a single concrete example - because, of course, anyone skilled with LLMs would be able to trivially solve any such example within 10 minutes.
Perhaps the occasional program that relies heavily on precise visual alignment will fail - but I dare say if we give the LLM the same grace we'd give a visually impaired designer, it can do exactly as well.
I recently asked an LLM to give me one of the most basic and well-documented algorithms in the world: a blocked matrix multiply. It's essentially a few nested loops and some constants for the block size.
It failed massively, spitting out garbage code, where the comments claimed to use blocking access patterns, but the code did not actually use them at all.
LLMs are, frankly, nearly useless for programming. They may solve a problem every once in a while, but once you look at the code, you notice it's either directly plagiarized or bad quality (or both, I suppose, in the latter case).
I have a very anecdotal, but interesting, counterexample.
I recently asked Gemini 3 Pro to create an RSS feed reader type of experience by using XSLT to style and layout an OPML file. I specifically wanted it to use a server-side proxy for CORS, pass through caching headers in the proxy to leverage standard HTTP caching, and I needed all feed entries for any feed in the OPML to be combined into a single chronological feed.
It initially told multiple times that it wasn't possible (it also reminded me that Google is getting rid of XSLT). Regardless, after reiterating that it is possible multiple times it finally decided to make a temporary POC. That POC worked on the first try, with only one follow up to standardize date formatting with support for Atom and RSS.
I obviously can't say the code was novel, though I would be a bit surprised if it trained on that task enough for it to remember roughly the full implementation and still claimed it was impossible.
Why do you believe that to be a counterexample? In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input, the question is really how large the largest re-usable fragment was and whether or not barring some transformations you could trace it back to the original. I've done some experiments along the same lines to see what it spits out and what I noticed is that from example to example the programming style changed drastically, to the point that I suspect that it was mimicking even the style and not just the substance of the input data, and this over chunks of code long enough that it would definitely clear the bar for plagiarism.
> In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input
Yes, and Shakespeare merely copied the existing 26 letters of the English alphabet. What magical process do you think students are using when they read and re-combine learned examples to solve assignments?
This same argument has now been made a couple of times in this thread (in different guises) and does absolutely nothing to move the conversation forward.
Words and letters are not copyrightable patterns in and of themselves. It is the composition of words and letters that we consider to be original creations and 'the bard' put them in a meaningful and original order not seen before, which established his reputation as a playwright.
LLMs can definitely produce original other stuff: ask it to create an original poem and on an extremely specific niche subject and it will do so. You can specify the niche subject to the point where it is incredibly unlikely that there is a poem on that subject in its training data, and it will still produce an original poem on that subject [0]. The well-known "otter using wifi on a plane" series of images [1] is another example: this is not in the training data (well, it is now, because well-known, but you get the idea).
Is there something unique about code, that is different from language (or images), that would make it impossible for an LLM to produce original code? I don't believe so, but I'm willing to be convinced.
I think this switches the burden of proof: we know LLMs can produce original content in other contexts. Why would they not be able to create original code?
[0] Ever curious, I tested this assumption. I got Claude to write an original limerick about goats oiling their beards with olive oil, which was the first reasonable thing I could think of as a suitably niche subject. I googled the result and could not find anything close to it. I then asked it to produce another limerick on the same subject, and it produced a different limerick, so obviously not just repeating training data.
No, it transformed your prompt. Another person giving it the same prompt will get the same result when starting from the same state. f('your prompt here') is a transformation of your prompt based on hidden state.
This just reeks of a lack of understanding of how transformers work. Unlike Markov Chains that can only regurgitate known sequences, transformers can actually make new combinations.
What's your proof that the average college student can produce original code? I'm reasonably certain I can get an LLM to write something that will pass any test that the average college student can, as far as that goes.
I'm not asking about averages. I'm asking about any. There is no need to perform an academic research study to prove that humans are capable of writing original code because the existence of our conversation right now is the counter-example to disprove the negation.
Yes, it is true that a lot of humans remix existing code. But not all. It has yet to be proven that any LLM is doing something more than remixing code.
I would submit as evidence to this idea (LLMs are not capable of writing original code) the fact that not a single company using LLM-based AI coding has developed a novel product that has outpaced its competition. In any category. If AI really makes people "10x" more productive, then companies that adopted AI a year ago should be 10 years ahead of their competition. Substitute any value N > 1 you want and you won't see it. Indeed, given the stories we're seeing of the massive amounts of waste that is occurring within AI startups and companies adopting AI, it would suggest that N < 1.
I generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit.
Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.
GitHub, Bitbucket, GCE, AWS…all have licensing agreements for user contributions which the user flagged as “public” so I’m not exactly clear of your point if you are holding SO up as a bastion of intellectual property rights different from the other places LLM training sets were scraped from.
If you reproduce something, usually you have to check the earlier implementation for it and copy it over. This would inevitably require you to look at the license and author of said code.
Assuming of course, you're talking about nontrivial functionality, because obviously we're not talking about trivial one-liners etc.
Student? Good learner? Pretty much what everyone does can be boiled down to reading lots of other code that’s been written and adapting it to a use case. Sure, to some extent models are regurgitating memorized information, but for many tasks they’re regurgitating a learned method of doing something and backfilling the specifics as needed— the memorization has been generalized.
Are you saying that every piece of code you have ever written contains a full source list of every piece of code you previously read to learn specific languages, patterns, etc?
Or are you saying that every piece of code you ever wrote was 100% original and not adapted from any previous codebase you ever worked in or any book / reference you ever read?
While I generally agree with you, this "LLM is a human" comparisons really are tiresome I feel. It hasn't been proven and I don't know how many other legal issued could have solved if adding "like a human" made it okay. Google v Oracle? "oh, you've never learned an API??!?" or take the original Google Books controversy - "its reading books and memorizing them, like humans can". I do agree its different but I don't like this line of argument at all.
I agree, that's why I was trying to point out that saying "if a person did that we'd have a word for them" is useless. They are not people, and people don't behave like that anyway. It adds nothing to the discussion.
The original point, that LLMs are plagiarising inputs, is a very common and common sense opinion.
There are court cases where this is being addressed currently, and if you think about how LLMs operate, a reasonable person typically sees that it looks an awful lot like plagiarism.
If you want to claim it is not plagiarism, that requires a good argument, because it is unclear that LLMs can produce novelty, since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.
I need you to prove to me that it's not plagiarism when you write code that uses a library after reading documentation, I guess.
> since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.
Is that how they are able to produce unique code based on libraries that didn't exist in their training set? Or that they themselves wrote? Is that how you can give them the documentation for an API and it writes code that uses it? Your desire to make LLMs "not special" has made you completely blind to reality. Come back to us.
Oh wild, I was operating under the assumption that the law requires you to prove that a law was broken, but it turns out you need to prove it wasn't. Thanks!
The LLM is trained on a corpus of text, and when it is given a sequence of tokens, it finds a set of token that, when one of them is appended, make the resulting sequence most like the text in that corpus.
If it is given a sequence of tokens that is unlike anything in its corpus, all bets are off and it produces garbage, just like machine learning models in general: if the input is outside the learned distribution, quality goes downhill fast.
The fact that they've added a Monte Carlo feature to the sequence generation, which makes it sometimes select a token that is slightly less like the most exact match in the corpus does not change this.
LLMs are fuzzy lookup tables for existing text, that hallucinate text for out-of-distribution queries.
This is LLM 101.
If the LLM was only trained using documentation, then there would be no problem. If it would generate a design, look at the documentation, understand the semantics of both, and translate the design to code by using the documentation as a guide.
But that's not how it works. It has open source repositories in its corpus that it then recreates by chaining together examples in this stochastic parrot -method I described above.
Programmers are willingly blind to this, at least until it's their code being stolen or they lose their job.
_LLMs are lossily compressed archives of stolen code_.
Trying to achieve AI through compression is nothing new.[0] The key innovation[1] is that the model[2] does not output only the first order input data but also the higher order patterns from the input data.
That is certainly one component of intelligence but we need to recognize that the tech companies didn't build AI, they build a compression algorithm which, combined with the stolen input text, can reproduce the input data and its patterns in an intelligent-looking way.
[1]: Oh, god, this phrase is already triggering my generated-by-LLM senses.
[2]: Model of what? Of the stolen text. If 99.9999% of the work to achieve AI wasn't done by people whose work was stolen, they wouldn't be called models.
I've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail.
Not to mention the moral vagaries of "if you use a library, is the complete articulation of your thing actually 100% your code?"
Is there a difference between loading and using a function from ImageMagick, and a standalone copycat function that mimics a function from ImageMagick?
What if you need it transliterated from one language to another?
Is it really that different than those 1200 page books from the 90's that walk you through implementing a 3D engine from scratch (or whatever the topic might be)? If you make a game on top of that book's engine, is your game truly yours?
If you learn an algorithm in some university class and then just write it again later, is that code yours? What if your code is 1-for-1 a copy of the code you were taught?
It gets very murky very quick!
Obviously I would encourage proper citation, but I also recognize the reality of this stuff -- what if you're fully rewriting something you learned decades ago and don't know who to cite? What if you have some code snippet from a website long forgotten that you saved and used? What if you use a library that also uses a library that you're not aware of because you didn't bother to check, and you either cite the wrapper lib or cite nothing at all?
I don't have some grand theory or wise thoughts about this shit, and I enjoy the anthropological studies trying to ascertain provenance / assign moral authority to remarkable edge cases, but end of the day I also find it exhausting to litigate the use of a tool that exploited the fact that your code got hoovered up by a giant robot because it was public, and might get regurgitated elsewhere.
To me, this is the unfortunate and unfair story of Gregory Coleman [0] -- drummer for The Winstons, who recorded "Amen, Brother" in 1969 (which gave us the most-sampled drum break in the world, spawned multiple genres of music, and changed human history) -- the man never made a dime from it, never even knew, and died completely destitute, despite his monumental contribution to culture. It's hard to reconcile the unjustness of it all, yet not that hard to appreciate the countless positive things that came out of it.
I don't know. I guess at the end of the day, does the end justify the means? Feels pretty subjective!
What amazes me is how many programmers have absolutely no concept about copyright at all. This should be taught as a basic component of any programming course.
> Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things
Because the rendered output (pixels, not HTML/CSS) is not fed as data in the training. You will find tons of UI snippets and questions, but they rarely included screenshots. And if they do, the are not scraped.
Interesting thought. I wonder if Anthropic et al could include some sort of render-html-to-screenshot as part of the training routine, such that the rendered output would get included as training data.
Even better, a tool that can tell the rendered bounding box of any set of elements, and what the distances between pairs of elements are, so it can make adjustments if relative positioning doesn't match its expectation. This would be incredible for SVG generation for diagrams, too.
thats basically a VLM, but the problem is that describing the world requires a better understanding of the world. Hence why LeCunn is talking about world models (Its also cutting edge for teaching robots to manipulate and plan manipulations)
Well, I don't know but many LLMs are multimodal and understand pictures and images. You can upload videos to Gemini and they're tokenised and fed into the LLM. If some programming blog post has a screenshot with the result of some UI code, why would that not be scraped and used for training? Is there some reason that wouldn't be possible?
Why is this something a Wayland compositor (a glorified window manager) needs to worry about? Apple figured this out back in the 1990s with ColorSync and they did it once for the Mac OS and any application that wanted colour management could use the ColorSync APIs.
Color management infrastructure is intricate. To grossly simplify: somehow you need to connect together the profile and LUT for each display, upload the LUTs to the display controller, and provide appropriate profile data for each window to their respective processes. During compositing then convert buffers that don't already match the output (unmanaged applications will probably be treated as sRGB, color managed graphics apps will opt out of conversion and do whatever is correct for their purpose).
Yes, but why is the compositor dealing with this? Shouldn't the compositor simply be deciding which windows go where (X, Y, and Z positions) and leave the rendering to another API? Why does every different take on a window manager need to re-do all this work?
Turning the question around, what other part of the system _could_ do this job? And how would the compositor do any part of its job if it doesn't have access to both window contents and displays? I'm not super deep in this area but a straight-forward example of a non-managed app and a color-aware graphics app running on a laptop with an external display seems like it is enough to figure out how things need to go together. This neglects some complicating factors like display pixel density, security, accessibility, multi-GPU, etc, but I think it more or less explains how the Wayland authors arrived at its design and how some of the problems got there.
I'm questioning the idea that people should be writing compositors at all. Why doesn't Wayland itself do the compositing and let everyone else just manage windows?
It's like going to Taco Bell and they make you grind your own corn for your tortillas.
Why? Probably better to ask the Wayland developers that. Maybe you're right. That said, whether everyone uses the same compositor and window management is modular, or not and shared code travels as libraries, I don't think the complexity of color management is much different.
I mean, when I hear the word "compositing" I definitely imagine something that involves "alpha" blending, and doing that nicely (instead of a literal alpha calculation) is going to involve colour management.
That's on the Wayland team though. They drew up the new API boundaries and decided that all window managers would now be in the business of compositing.
If I wanted to put it most uncharitably, I'd say they decided to push all of the hard parts out of Wayland itself and force everyone else to deal with them.
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.
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."
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.
Hum, table cells provide the max-width and images a min-with, heights are absolute (with table cells spilling over, as with CCS "overflow-y: visible"), aligns and maybe HSPACE and VSPACE attributes do the rest. As long as images heights exceed the effective line-height and there's no visible text, this should render pixel perfect on any browser then in use. In this case, there's also an absolute width set for the entire table, adding further constraints. Table layouts can be elastic, with constraints or without, but this one should be pretty stable.
(Fun fact, the most amazing layout foot-guns, then: Effective font sizes and line-heights are subject to platform and configuration (e.g., Win vs Mac); Netscape does paragraph spacing at 1.2em, IE at 1em (if this matters, prefer `<br>` over paragraphs); frames dimensions in Netscape are always calculated as integer percentages of window dimensions, even if you provide absolute dimensions in pixels, while IE does what it says on the tin (a rare example), so they will be the same only by chance and effective rounding errors. And, of course, screen gamma is different on Win and Mac, so your colors will always be messed up – aim for a happy medium.)
Oh good times, the screen gamma issue got me many times back then, as I was the super odd kid on a Mac in the late 90's (father was in education). I'd pull my beautify crafted table-soup site up on a friends PC later and wonder why all the colors were all wacky!
Do you not remember the good old days when people who focussed on graphics design rather than content put 'Best used with Netscape/IE5.5' on their pages?
This has been my experience with almost everything I've tried to create with generative AI, from apps and websites, to photos and videos, to text and even simple sentences. At first glance, it looks impressive, but as soon as you look closer, you start to notice that everything is actually just sloppy copy.
That being said, sloppy copy can make doing actual work a lot faster if you treat it with the right about of skepticism and hand-holding.
It's first attempt at the Space Jam site was close enough that it probably could have been manually fixed by an experienced developer in less time than in takes to write the next prompt.
but my experience has also been that with every model they require less hand holding and the code is less sloppy. If I’m careful with my prompts, gpt codex 5.1 recently has been making a lot of typescript for me that is basically production ready in a way it couldn’t even 2 months ago
- "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."
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.
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.
Hm, I didn't try exactly this, but I probably should!
Wrt unit test script, let's take Claude out of the equation, how would you design the unit test? I kept running into either Claude or some library not being capable of consistently identifying planet vs non planet which was hindering Claude's ability to make decisions based on fine detail or "pixel coordinates" if that makes sense.
If I were to do this (and I might give it a try, this is quite an interesting case), I would try to run a detection model on the image, to find bounding boxes for the planets and their associated text. Even a small model running on CPU should be able to do this relatively quickly.
Do you give Claude the screenshot as a file? If so I’d just ask it to write a tool to diff each asset to every possible location in the source image to find the most likely position of each asset. You don’t really need recognition if you can brute force the search. As a human this is roughly what I would do if you told me I needed to recreate something like that with pixel perfect precision.
Ok! will give it a shot. In a few iterations I gave him screenshots, i have given him the ability to take screenshots, and I gave him the Playwright MCP. I kind of gave up on the path you're suggesting (though I didn't get super far along) because I felt like I would run into this problem eventually of needing a model to figure out what a planet is, where the edge of the planet is, etc.
But if that could be done deterministically, I totally agree this is the way to go. I'll put some more time into it over the next couple weeks.
Congratulations, we finally created 'plain English' programming languages. It only took 1/10th of the worlds electricity and 40% of the semiconductor production.
Yes, this is a key step when working with an agent—if they're able to check their work, they can iterate pretty quickly. If you're in the loop, something is wrong.
I'm trying to understand why this comment got downvoted. My best guess is that "if you're in the loop, something is wrong" is interpreted as there should be no human involvement at all.
The loop here, imo, refers to the feedback loop. And it's true that ideally there should be no human involvement there. A tight feedback loop is as important for llms as it is for humans. The more automated you make it, the better.
Yes, maybe I goofed on the phrasing. If you're in the feedback loop, something is wrong. Obviously a human should be "in the loop" in the sense that they're aware of and reviewing what the agent is doing.
The sentence immediately after that would imply sarcasm
> Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree. Please please please help (sad emoji)
There was a response to this post on the front page earlier this morning that was able to get Claude to succeed simply by giving it access to Playwright so it could see what it was doing and telling it in the prompt that it needed to be pixel perfect:
As of right now, it seems to have been flagged into oblivion by the anti-AI crowd. I found both posts to be interesting, and it's unfortunate that one of them is missing from the conversation.
Context is king. The problem is that you are the one currently telling Claude how close it is and what to do next. But if you give it the tools to do that itself, it will make a world of difference.
Give Claude a way to iteratively poke at what it created (such as a playwright harness), and screenshot of what you want, and maybe a way to take a screenshot in Playwright and I think you will get much closer. You might even be able to one shot it.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if I gave it a screenshot and told it to iterate until the Playwright screenshot matched the mock screenshot, pixel perfect. I imagine it would go nuts, but after a few hours I think it would likely get it. (Either that or minor font discrepancies and rounding errors would cause it to give up…)
The key is always feedback loop. If you give the AI the ability to verify itself, then it's able to iterate faster. Sure, it may take many iterations, but at least the iteration spans will be shorter than waiting for a human to validate each time.
I'd be curious to see how Antigravity compares for the same task with its automatic browser agentic validation logic.
Claude is not very good at using screenshots. The model may technically be multi-modal, but its strength is clearly in reading text. I'm not surprised it failed here.
Especially since it decomposes the image into a semantic vector space rather than the actual grid of pixels. Once the image is transformed into patch embeddings all sense of pixels is entirely destroyed. The author demonstrates a profound lack of understanding for how multimodal LLMs function that a simple query of one would elucidate immediately.
The right way to handle this is not to build it grids and whatnot, which all get blown away by the embedding encoding but to instruct it to build image processing tools of its own and to mandate their use in constructing the coordinates required and computing the eccentricity of the pattern etc in code and language space. Doing it this way you can even get it to write assertive tests comparing the original layout to the final among various image processing metrics. This would assuredly work better, take far less time, be more stable on iteration, and fits neatly into how a multimodal agentic programming tool actually functions.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. LLMs don't have precise geometrical reasoning from images. Having an intuition of how the models work is actually.a defining skill in "prompt engineering"
Asking your favorite LLM actually helps a lot. They generally are well trained on LLM papers unsurprisingly. In this case though it’s important to realize the LLM is incapable of seeing or hearing or reading. Everything has to be transformed into a vector space. Images are generally cut into patches (like 16x16) which are themselves transformed by several neural networks to convert them into a semantic space represented by the models parameters.
But this isn’t hugely different than your vision. You don’t see the pixel grid either. You have to use tools to measure things. You have the ability over time to iteratively interact with the image by perhaps counting grid lines but the LLM does not - it’s a one shot inference against this highly transformed image. They’ve gotten better at complex visual tasks including types of counting, but it’s not able to examine the image in any analytical way or even in its original representation. It’s just not possible.
It can however make tools that can. It’s very good at working with PIL and other image processing libraries or even writing image processing code de novo, and then using those to ground itself. Likewise it can not do math, but it can write a calculator that can do highly complex mathematics on its behalf.
Even with text, parsing content in 2D seems to be a challenge for every LLM I have interacted with. Try getting a chatbot to make an ascii-art circle with a specific radius and you'll see what I mean.
I don't really consider ASCII art to be text. It requires a completely different type of reasoning. A blind person can be understand text if it's read out loud. A blind person really can't understand ASCII art if it's read out loud.
This article is a bit negative. Claude gets close , it just can't get the order right which is something OP can manually fix.
I prefer GitHub Copilot because it's cheaper and integrates with GitHub directly. I'll have times where it'll get it right, and times when I have to try 3 or 4 times.
what if the LLM gets something wrong that the operator (a junior dev perhaps) doesn't even know it's wrong? that's the main issue: if it fails here, it will fail with other things, in not such obvious ways.
>what if the LLM gets something wrong that the operator (a junior dev perhaps) doesn't even know it's wrong?
the same thing that always happens if a dev gets something wrong without even knowing it's wrong - either code review/QA catches it, or the user does, and a ticket is created
>if it fails here, it will fail with other things, in not such obvious ways.
is infallibility a realistic expectation of a software tool or its operator?
I think that's the main problem with them. It is hard to figure out when they're wrong.
As the post shows, you can't trust them when they think they solved something but you also can't trust them when they think they haven't[0]. The things are optimized for human preference, which ultimately results in this being optimized to hide mistakes. After all, we can't penalize mistakes in training when we don't know the mistakes are mistakes. The de facto bias is that we prefer mistakes that we don't know are mistakes than mistakes that we do[1].
Personally I think a well designed tool makes errors obvious. As a tool user that's what I want and makes tool use effective. But LLMs flip this on the head, making errors difficult to detect. Which is incredibly problematic.
[0] I frequently see this in a thing it thinks is a problem but actually isn't, which makes steering more difficult.
[1] Yes, conceptually unknown unknowns are worse. But you can't measure unknown unknowns, they are indistinguishable from knowns. So you always optimize deception (along with other things) when you don't have clear objective truths (most situations).
All AI's are overconfident. It's impressive what they can do, but it is at the same time extremely unimpressive what they can't do while passing it off as the best thing since sliced bread. 'Perfect! Now I see the problem.'. 'Thank you for correcting that, here is a perfect recreation of problem 'x' that will work with your hardware.' (never mind the 10 glaring mistakes).
I've tried these tools a number of times and spent a good bit of effort on learning to maximize the return. By the time you know what prompt to write you've solved the problem yourself.
“Bad” seems extreme. The only way to pass the litmus test you’ve described is for a tool to be 100% perfect, so then the graph looks like 99.99% “bad tool” until it reaches 100% perfection.
It’s not that binary imo. It can still be extremely useful and save a ton of time if it does 90% of the work and you fix the last 10%. Hardly a bad tool.
It’s only a bad tool if you spent more time fixing the results than building it yourself, which sometimes used to be the case for LLMs but is happening less and less as they get more capable.
If you show me a tool that does a thing perfectly 99% of the time, I will stop checking it eventually. Now let me ask you: How do you feel about the people who manage the security for your bank using that tool? And eventually overlooking a security exploit?
I agree that there are domains for which 90% good is very, very useful. But 99% isn't always better. In some limited domains, it's actually worse.
That is a true and useful component of analyzing risk, but the point is that human behaviour isn't a simple risk calculation. We tend to over-guard against things that subjectively seem dangerous, and under-guard against things that subjectively feel safe.
This isn't about whether AI is statistically safer, it's actually about the user experience of AI: If we can provide the same guidance without lulling a human backup into complacency, we will have an excellent augmented capability.
I wouldn't go that far, but I do believe good tool design tries to make its failure modes obvious. I like to think of it similar to encryption: hard to do, easy to verify.
All tools have failure modes and truthfully you always have to check the tool's work (which is your work). But being a master craftsman is knowing all the nuances behind your tools, where they work, and more importantly where they don't work.
That said, I think that also highlights the issue with LLMs and most AI. Their failure modes are inconsistent and difficult to verify. Even with agents and unit tests you still have to verify and it isn't easy. Most software bugs are created from subtle things, often which compound. Which both those things are the greatest weaknesses of LLMs: nuance and compounding effects.
So I still think they aren't great tools, but I do think they can be useful. But that also doesn't mean it isn't common for people to use them well outside the bounds of where they are generally useful. It'll be fine a lot of times, but the problem is that it is like an alcohol fire[0]; you don't know what's on fire because it is invisible. Which, after all, isn't that the hardest part of programming? Figuring out where the fire is?
That's my thinking. If I need to check up on the work, then I'm equally capable of writing the code myself. It might go faster with an LLM assisting me, and that feels perfectly fine. My issue is when people use the AI tools to generate something far beyond their own capabilities. In those cases, who checks the result?
ya, this is true. Another commenter also pointed out that my intention was to one-shot. I didn't really go too deeply into trying to try multiple iterations.
This is also fairly contrived, you know? It's not a realistic limitation to rebuild HTML from a screenshot because of course if I have the website loaded I can just download the HTML.
This is precisely the workflow when a traditional graphic designer mocks up a web/app design, which still happens all the time.
They sketch a design in something like Photoshop or Illustrator, because they're fluent in these tools and many have been using them for decades, and somebody else is tasked with figuring out how to slice and encode that design in the target interactive tech (HTML+CSS, SwiftUI, QT, etc).
Large companies, design agencies, and consultancies with tech-first design teams have a different workflow, because they intentionally staff graphic designers with a tighter specialization/preparedness, but that's a much smaller share of the web and software development space than you may think.
There's nothing contrived at all about this test and it's a really great demonstration of how tools like Claude don't take naturally to this important task yet.
(1) Multi-modal is where a lot of these things go to die. You will hear people talk about the occasional striking success but so often I show Copilot an easily identifiable flower image and it gets it wrong even though Google Lens will get it right
(2) The kind of dialog he's having with Claude is a kind of communication pattern I've found never works with LLMs. Sure there is the kind of conversation that goes
Do X
... that's pretty good except for Y
Great!
but if it is
Do X
and it comes back with something entirely wrong I'd assume the state of the thing is corrupted and it is never coming back and no matter how you interrogate it, encourage it, advise it, threaten it, whatever, you will go in circles.
I got quite close with Gemini 3 pro in AI studio. I uploaded a screenshot (no assets) and the results were similar to OP. It failed to follow my fix initially but I told it to follow my directions (lol) and it came quite close (though portrait mode distorted it, landscape was close to perfect.
“Reference the original uploaded image. Between each image in the clock face, create lines to each other image. Measure each line. Now follow that same process on the app we’ve created, and adjust the locations of each image until all measurements align exactly.”
Couldn’t you just feed Claude all the raw, inspect element HTML from the website and have it “decrypt” that?
The entire website is fairly small so this seems feasible.
Usually there’s a big difference between a website’s final code and its source code because of post processing but that seems like a totally solvable Claude problem.
Sure LLMs aren’t great with images, but it’s not like the person who originally wrote the Space Jam website was meticulously messing around with positioning from a reference image to create a circular orbit — they just used the tools they had to create an acceptable result. Claude can do the same.
Perhaps the best method is to re-create, rather than replicate the design.
I'm using source code like it's used when referring to source code vs executables. React doesn't simply spit out HTML, nor the JSX used to write said React code, it outputs a mixture of things that's the optimized HTML/CSS/JS version of the React you wrote. This is akin to source code and the optimized binaries we actually use.
Perhaps the wrong usage of "source code". I probably should've been more precise. Forgive my lack of vocabulary to describe the difference I was referring to.
There were no binaries or packages. You wrote the HTML in notepad or maybe you used some "high speed IDE" with syntax highlighting and some buttons like Dreamweaver and then uploaded it via FTP to whatever server you were hosting it on. No muss, no fuss. It was a glorious time and I miss that internet a lot.
I think you're assuming a pattern existed in 1996 that didn't actually exist until the 2010s.
In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files.
Even a decade later, React and the frontend-framework sort of thinking wasn't really a big thing. People had started to make lots of things with "DHTML" in the early 2000s where JavaScript was used to make things spicier (pretty animations, some server side loading with AJAX) and still often worked without JS enabled in a pattern called graceful degradation.
What you'd get from "View Source", or "Inspect Element", and what was literally saved on disk of spacejam.com, was almost certainly the same content.
I'm not trying to dispute this though. Although I appreciate the clarity, I am aware of the web's past.
The only point I was trying to make was that this project could be better achieved by an LLM if spacejam.com's HTML is supplied.
For why you'd want to do this rather than simply use the original code is up to the developer, but I'd expect a common reason to be the ease of modern frameworks. Some justifications for making Claude create the same code again in a different framework include:
- Using <script> tags is bad practice in a lot of modern frameworks, and it's better to just translate to React and run your logic directly within components.
- Perhaps you're using TailwindCSS, in which case it's a good idea to port over all the original CSS so you can have unified codebase.
- Hosting on modern frameworks is often conveinent.
- Sometimes (although maybe not for a website this small) the source code with a framework is less verbose.
You probably misunderstood me because I paraphrased "raw" HTML several times throughout my comments in this thread before I actually read the page source and realized it was the original source code.
I think that the reason why everyone is acting surprised about your suggestion is that the target wasn’t to obtain the page in some higher level framework or anything. The HTML of the page was what the author wanted Claude to output. Would he used source HTML as an input, there would be nothing for Claude to do. Different exercise.
I wouldn't call it entirely defeated, it got maybe 90% of the way there. Before LLMs you couldn't get 50% of the way there in an automated way.
> What he produces
I feel like personifying LLMs more than they currently are is a mistake people make (though humans always do this), they're not entities, they don't know anything. If you treat them too human you might eventually fool yourself a little too much.
As a couple other comments pointed out, it's also not fair to judge Claude based on a one shot like this. I sort of assume these limitations will remain even if we went back and forth but to be fair, I didn't try that more than a few times in this investigation. Maybe on try three it totally nails it.
Very true, I would also caution this with test projects with real humans in the hiring process. Comparing one-shots from actual people is unfair too, and often the most valid assessment comes with giving them feedback and seeing how they respond to it.
Aside from that point: if you are reading this and making people do a project as part of the hiring process, you should absolutely be paying them for their time (even a token amount).
I checked the source of the original (like maybe many of you) to check how they actually did it and it was... simpler than expected. I drilled myself so hard to forget tables as layout... And here it is. So simple it's a marvel.
I almost did it with the plain claude code on a $20 plan, without any skills, by leveraging my domain expertise with the following prompt:
Your goal is to create an HTML5 website that is pixel-accurate as the screenshot @Space-Jam.png . You can use the image files in the `img` folder. To achieve pixel-level reproduction, first write auxiliary programs to measure the pixel locations of the objects on this page. Then use your measurements to create the page. Consider using feature detection/matching with per-object (x, y) offsets and a global scale factor shared by all objects as the free parameters. Consider using RANSAC for robust estimation. After obtaining an initial estimation, crop the image of each object and use local sparse optical flow for refinement. Use JPG format for visual inspection of intermediate results. Your webpage should be able to scale with the window size.
Note: the footer text size/locations are off. We can probably fix that by explicitly asking cc to write scripts for text bounding box detection.
He's using it correctly, in its secondary sense of "belonging or appropriate to an earlier period, especially so as to seem conspicuously old-fashioned or outdated."
Still not quite convinced that the adjective should be applied to the website itself in a quite loose use of the word.
Warner Bros anachronistically keeps this website online would be a simple fix; here used to reference and to point out that maintaining an untouched 1996 promotional site at it's original location is not typical for the lifecycle of a website, usually the publisher would rather redirect clicks to some current offer.
Othwerwise there is no anachronism here with the website itself, just it's location under the original URL and not in some archive only.
The website itself fulfilled its purpose for promoting the movie when it was released and simply continues to exist.
You wouldn’t call posters, magazines, or other artifacts from the ’90s anachronistic just for still existing.
Being retrievable doesn’t make something outdated by itself.
“Anachronistic” would apply only if a new promotional site were created today to look like this—though that would more likely be called “retro.”
Or if the movie industry insisted on using CSS-free table layouts for all its promotional websites, similar to other norms or laws that feel anachronistic because they no longer match current needs.
Sadly the whole piece reads like it was written 80%+ by an LLM too, seriously why all the emojis?
But apparently this is where content is heading in general.
I just feel this is a great example of someone falling into the common trap of treating an LLM like a human.
They are vastly less intelligent than a human and logical leaps that make sense to you make no sense to Claude. It has no concept of aesthetics or of course any vision.
All that said; it got pretty close even with those impediments! (It got worse because the writer tried to force it to act more like a human would)
I think a better approach would be to write a tool to compare screenshots, identity misplaced items and output that as a text finding/failure state. claude will work much better because your dodging the bits that are too interpretive (that humans rock at and LLMs don't)
I meant that frame very deliberately. Use of the word AI is misleading people that LLMs are intelligent.
They model what looks like intelligence but with very hard limits. The two advantages they have over human brains are perfect recall and data storage. They are also faster.
But the brain is vastly more intelligent:
- It can learn concepts (e.g. language) with an order of magnitude less information
- It responds in parallel to multiple formats of stimuli (e.g. sight/sound)
- LLMs lack the ability to generalise
- The brain interprets and understands what it experienced
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me wrong: I use AI, it is by far some of the most impressive tech we have built so far, and it has potential to advance society significantly.
But it is definitely, vastly, less intelligent than us.
The blog frequently refers to the LLM as "him" instead of "it" which somehow feels disturbing to me.
I love to anthropomorphize things like rocks or plants, but something about doing it to an AI that responds in human like language enters an uncanny valley or otherwise upsets me.
Claude is surprisingly bad at visual understanding. I did a similar thing to OP where I wanted Claude to visually iterate on Storybook components. I found outsourcing the visual check to Playwright in vision mode (as opposed to using the default a11y tree) and Codex for understanding worked best. But overall the idea of a visual inspection loop went nowhere. I blogged about it here: https://solbach.xyz/ai-agent-accessibility-browser-use/
The article does not say at any point which model was used. This is the most basic important information when talking about the capabilities of a model, and probably belongs in the title.
It does (unless the previous comment was edited? Currently it says Opus 4.1): https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-1. You can see it in the 'more models' list on the main Claude website, or in Claude Console.
Interesting - these models are all trained to do pixel-level(ish) measurement now, for bounding boxes and such. I wonder if you could railroad it into being accurate with the right prompt.
What models are good at this? I have tried passing images to models and asking them for coordinates for specific features, then overlaid dots on those points and passed that image back to the model so it has a perception of how far out it was. It had a tendency to be consistently off by a fixed amount without getting closer.
I don't doubt that it is possible eventually, but I haven't had much luck.
Something that seemed to assist was drawing a multi coloured transparent chequerboard, if the AI knows the position of the grid colours it can pick out some relative information from the grid.
I've found Qwen3-VL to be fairly accurate at detection (though it doesn't always catch every instance). Note that it gives answers as per-mille-ages, as if the image was 1000x1000 regardless of actual resolution or aspect ratio.
I have also not had luck with any kind of iterative/guess-and-check approach. I assume the models are all trained to one-shot this kind of thing and struggle to generalize to what are effectively relative measurements.
Feels like the "right" approach would be to have it write some code to measure how far off the elements are in the original vs recreated image, and then iterate using the numerical output of the program...
Not sure how good Claude is nowadays, but I remember using Claude 3.5 to do some fiction writing and for a while I thought it was amazing at coming up with plots, setting ideas, writing witty dialogue - then after a short while I noticed it kept recycling the same ideas, phrases etc, quickly becoming derivative, and having 'tells', similar to the group of 3 quirk, with some otherwise decent writing patterns showing up with great frequency.
I've heard the same thing about it doing frontends - it produces gorgeous websites but it has similar 'tells', it does CSS and certain features the same way, and if you have a very concrete idea of what you want out of it, you'll end up fighting an uphill battle with it constantly trying to do things its own way.
Which is part of the 'LLM illusion' - I guess. To an unskilled individual, or when starting from scratch, it seems great, but the more complex the project gets, the harder it becomes to have it contribute meaningfully, leading to an ever-mounting frustration, and eventually me just giving up and doing it by hand.
It seems to me that Claude's error here (which is not unique to it) is self-sycophancy. The model is too eager to convince itself it did a good job.
I'd be curious to hear from experienced agent users if there is some AGENTS.md stuff to make the LLM more clear speaking? I wonder if that would impact the quality of work.
Claude argued with me about the quadratic equation the other day. It vehemently felt a -c was required whereas a c was the correct answer. I pointed this out showing step by step and it finally agreed. I tried Grok to see if it could get it right. Nope, the exact same response as Claude, but Grok never backed down; even after the step by step explanation of the maths.
LLMs can, for example, write a script to calculate all permutations of the levenshtein distances between words in a sentence and deliver it before the average programmer even understands what this means. Trivialy.
You're just holding it wrong if you're asking it to simply count the characters in a sentence.
I am going to give this a shot, but using a method I have been using lately with subagents. Basically, what I do is have it create an Architect, Executor, Adjudicator subagents. Architect breaks any ask down into atomic and testable subtasks that take 1-3 minutes 'dev' time. Executor (can spawn more than one) implements them. Then adjudicator reviews that they are to spec / requirements. This all happens in subagent files + a runbook.json in the .claude folder of a project. Its based on a paper* that was featured on here a while back actually [1].
THanks for sharing this. Partly because i forgot about this great website :D also because i would never thought of giving this as an LLM task because its so simple that i prolly just had hacked it down myself :D
I recently experimented alot with agentic coding (mostly with gemini+ intellij plugin, copilot intellij plugin and intellij's own junie) and also condsidered to give it a try and feed images to the AI, but than all tasks i tried so far were pure backend-ish so it never came to the point.
Im really curious how especially junie will act and i will give it a try with the very same task you gave it. We gonne see how it ends :D
LLM stands for large LANGUAGE models, so I guess you could succeed if you had a correct LANGUAGE. Maybe radial coordinates? Or turtle graphics? I myself tried to generate an SVG with twelve radial dots as in a clock in chatgpt, and failed (a year ago). Now I think it would succeed, however still the question is does it succeed because people trained it to do so.
Also I have noticed that AI generates things close to what you want, and it sticks really hard to that "close" qualifier, not wanting to cross any borders to get too close, so I'd be happy with the effect you have shown, as it is what AI does
I keep wondering ... is this a good benchmark? What is a practical use-case for the skills Claude is supposed to present here? And if the author needs that particular website re-created with pixel-perfect accuracy, woulnd't it me simpler to just to it yourself?
Sure, you can argue this is some sort of modern ACID-Test - but the ACID tests checked for real-world use-cases. This feels more like 'I have this one very specific request, the machine doesn't perfectly fullfill it, so the machine is at fault.'. Complaining from a high pedestal.
I'm more surprised at how close Claude got in its reimagined SpaceJam-site.
I would put Claude into a loop and let it make screenshots itself, diffing them against the original screenshot, until it has found the right arrangement at the planets‘ starting position (pixel perfect match).
I would try giving it a tool to work with projections and process axis by axis to see if it works better in 1D than 2D. I dunno how clever claude is about signal processing though. There's no noise here so... I mean really it's just template matching without rotation and without noise so... But I doubt claude can do or reason about basic image processing.
The real kicker is that LLMs were trained on modern web dev content where "tables for layout" is a cardinal sin. So you're asking it to do something its training data actively told it NOT to do for years.
Email HTML development is the last bastion of table-based layouts and it's wild that it's still necessary in 2024. Every time I touch email templates I feel like I'm time traveling.
Building something similar - using Claude API to generate mini games from text descriptions (https://codorex.com, still pretty rough).
Can confirm: Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts, but spatial precision is a constant battle. Anything involving exact pixel positions needs validation/correction layers on top.
The suggestion upthread about having it write its own measurement tools seems promising - haven't tried that approach yet.
Interesting that it handles this fine (functional orbital mechanics, animation) but would probably struggle to recreate the exact pixel positions of the Space Jam layout. Confirms the pattern: good at "make something like X" but bad at "recreate X exactly."
I wrote a 20,000 line multiplayer battle-arena game in XNA back in 2015 with manually coded physics (so everything is there in the code) and have tried several times with Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and GPT to translate it to JavaScript.
They all fail massively 100% of the time. Even if I break it down into chunks once they get to the chunks that matter the most (i.e. physics, collision detection and resolution, event handling and game logic) they all break down horribly and no amount of prompting back and forth will fix it.
I personally don't understand why asking these things to do things we know they can't do is supposed to be productive. Maybe for getting around restrictions or fuzzing... I don't see it as an effective benchmark unless it can link directly to the ways the models are being improved, but, to look at random results that sometimes are valid and think more iterations of randomness will eventually give way to control is a maddening perspective to me, but perhaps I need better language to describe this.
I think this is a reasonable take. I think for me, I like to investigate limitations like this in order to understand where the boundaries are. Claude isn't impossibly bad at analyzing images. It's just pixel perfect corrections that seem to be a limitation. Maybe for some folks it's enough to just read that but for me, I like to feel like I have some good experiential knowledge about the limitations that I can keep in my brain and apply appropriately in the future.
Yes but follow this forward, what about current models would be informative about future models. We've seen waves of "insight" come and go, to the point where there are endless waves of people at different points in the journey, there's a cohort of people that would be upset at the statement that prompt engineering is useless, and others that would support that as exactly right, and still more that would have a redefinition of the word prompt to include many other things. This is my exact complaint. You would want it work like how you want it to work, that our collective discoveries will turn into education and learning, but the content in the models and the subsequent inference based on that information have all not behaved like the physical sciences with regards to discoveries providing universal and reliable knowledge.
I think claude could have easily used a script to calculate the positions of the planets exactly here, instead of trying to use the frankly horrible image recognition.
Claude could probably have written a script to do it. I'm hunting assets to confirm.
Edit: yup very easy for claude. Most of the wall time was spent installing cv2 in a venv (uv dropped python 3.14 on claude, which seemed to get stuck compiling numpy or something so I interrupted and told claude to just use python 3.13 instead).
ME: In this directory there are two images: @p-pressbox.gif and @screenshot.png. @p-pressbox.gif is an image that exists somewhere inside @screenshot.png Write a script that finds the precise location
CLAUDE: Looking at the images, I can see that p-pressbox.gif (the spaceship with "PRESS BOX SHUTTLE" text) appears in the upper-left area of screenshot.png. I'll write a Python script using
OpenCV to find the precise location.
[ some venv stuff/telling claude to use uv and python 3.13 ]
CLAUDE: The script found the precise location of p-pressbox.gif within screenshot.png:
| Measurement | Value |
|---------------------|-----------------|
| Top-left corner | (87, 110) |
| Bottom-right corner | (218, 166) |
| Center | (152, 138) |
| Template size | 131 × 56 pixels |
| Match confidence | 97.2% |
The script is at /tmp/search/find_image.py and uses OpenCV's template matching with normalized cross-correlation.
ME> As part of the output create a visualization of the @p-pressbox.gif positioned on top of the original screenshot
CLAUDE: Done! The visualization shows a green rectangle highlighting the exact location where p-pressbox.gif was found within the screenshot. The match is at coordinates (87, 110) to (218,
166).
Oh what the heck. That worked really well for you. Would you be willing to recreate all the html and push it up to github? I'll drop the repo at the top of the blog post. It would be really cool for me to see this completely done and a great way to finish out the blog post. I obviously couldn't do it.
spacejam-1996.png is a full screenshot of the Space Jam 1996
landing page. We want to recreate this landing page as faithfully
as possible, matching the screenshot exactly.
The asset directory contains images extracted from the original
site. One of the images is tiled as the background of the landing
page. The other images should appear once in the screenshot. Use
these images as assets.
Precise positioning is very important for this project, so you
should writing a script that finds the precise location of each
asset image in screenshots. Use the tool to detect precise
positions in the target and fine tune the generated webpage. Be
sure to generate diagnostic images that can be easily reviewed by
a human reviewer.
Use python 3.13 and uv to create a venv while working.
I just let Claude (Opus 4.5) do anything it wanted to do as it went.
At this point all the image assets are pixel perfect but the footer is in the wrong place and I had to hold Claude's hand a bit to get the footer into the approximately correct spot:
I noticed you were struggling to find the position of the footer
text. You could try rendering two versions of the generated page, the
second time with the footer text black. Subtracting those two images
should give you a clean view of the footer text.
At this point Claude was having trouble because its hadn't got a clean view of the target text location in the original screenshot (it was creating scripts that look at the red channel in the bottom half of the image to pull out the text but that was also grabbing part of the site map logo. Interestingly it made a comment about this but didn't do anything about it). So I gave it this additional hint:
You are getting confused with the site map when analyzing the
original screenshot. You could blank out the positions of assets
so that they are not interfering with your analysis.
This got the footer in the correct location but the fonts/font sizes etc are not correct yet.
It's now got everything close after adding this final prompt:
We are very close. The footer is positioned in roughly the correct location
but the fonts, font sizes, font color and line spacings are all slightly
off.
This took quite a while and it build a few more tools to get there. And this was fine from a distance but it was using a san-serif when the screenshot has a serif etc. So I decided to push. From here it got very messy...
One of the issues is that Claude's text detection was getting tripped up by writing scripts using RGB space instead of something more hue-aware. It knew the text was red but was trying to isolate it by just looking at the red channel. But the grey dots from the background show up bright in the red channel so Claude would think those were center dots between the links that needed to be reproduced in the text. I gave it a hint:
I think dots from the background image are causing issues. Are you detecting the text
by looking only at the red channel in RGB space? The red channel will be bright on
white pixels in RGB. You could try using hue to separate text from background or use
distance from the target RGB value.
Claude decided to switch to HSV space. But it took quite a bit of effort to keep Claude remembering to use HSV because tools it had already written were still RGB and not updated (as were intermediate images that were not updated). Then it would try to step back and get a big picture as a sanity check and "discover" it had missed the dots that are obviously there. And when you would tell it there are no dots, you get the "You're absolutely right! They're vertical bars!" So it was a struggle. This is the closest I got:
Again, the top image stuff was done in the first shot with the prompt in the first one. Everything else has been about the footer. Claude has been writing a lot of clever scripts to measure font metrics and pick fonts etc, but it keeps falling over those dots. I could probably get it to work better with adding directives for text handling to CLAUDE.md and nuking context and some of the scripts it created.
This was very interesting. I've tried to create an "agent" Claude Code based system to generate design from screenshots, using Playwright and other tools to take screenshots for iterative improvements. So far I have failed despite weeks of struggles.
Thanks to this post I now have a deeper understanding as to why. Thank you.
This is spot on to my experience vibe coding. You can get pretty good scaffolding but tinkering with details is a nightmare. That is when you need to step in and take over yourself or you will burn all the time saved from the the scaffolding speed up.
I'm actually surprised Claude was about to do that much.
I hadn't even considered handing it a visual mockup to work from. Event though that workflow is par for the course for any web design team.
I would assume there must be at least some prior work into locating individual assets in a larger canvas. It just needs to be integrated into the pipeline.
I ran that against Gemini 3 Pro Preview with media resolution set to "high"
Here's the result:
Based on the image provided, here is the list of artists and albums in order from left to right, top to bottom:
**Row 1**
* **100 gecs** – 1000 gecs
* **Alex G** – House of Sugar
* **Angel Olsen** – My Woman
* **The Beths** – Future Me Hates Me
* **Big Thief** – U.F.O.F.
* **black midi** – Schlagenheim
* **Candy Claws** – Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time
* **Cloud Nothings** – Attack on Memory
**Row 2**
* **Courtney Barnett** – Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
* **D'Angelo & The Vanguard** – Black Messiah
* **Danny Brown** – Atrocity Exhibition
* **Deafheaven** – Sunbather
* **Deerhunter** – Halcyon Digest
* **Destroyer** – Kaputt
* **FKA twigs** – Magdalene
* **Flying Lotus** – Cosmogramma
**Row 3**
* **Frank Ocean** – Blonde
* **Hop Along** – Bark Your Head Off, Dog
* **The Hotelier** – Home, Like Noplace Is There
* **Japanese Breakfast** – Soft Sounds from Another Planet
* **Jeff Rosenstock** – Worry.
* **Julia Holter** – Have You in My Wilderness
* **Julien Baker** – Sprained Ankle
* **King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard** – Nonagon Infinity
**Row 4**
* **Mac DeMarco** – Salad Days
* **Oneohtrix Point Never** – Replica
* **Parquet Courts** – Wide Awake!
* **Perfume Genius** – No Shape
* **Phoebe Bridgers** – Stranger in the Alps
* **Sidney Gish** – No Dogs Allowed
* **SOPHIE** – Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides
* **St. Vincent** – Strange Mercy
**Row 5**
* **Sufjan Stevens** – Carrie & Lowell
* **Tame Impala** – Lonerism
* **Tim Hecker** – Virgins
* **Titus Andronicus** – The Monitor
* **Vampire Weekend** – Modern Vampires of the City
* **The War on Drugs** – Lost in the Dream
* **Weyes Blood** – Titanic Rising
* **Yves Tumor** – Safe in the Hands of Love
I have recently been working on something "fun" in the terminal that mingles plain ASCII, ANSI "graphics", actual bitmaps (Sixel), and Nerdfonts in a TUI framework (Charm etc). After a week of smashing Claude's head against a wall, which is better than smashing my own, I've had to significantly alter my hopes and expectations.
This is a great under the radar test for AI. I would put money on it failing to recreate the majority of 90s movie websites as it wasn't trained on them. The old cowboy webmasters that built and ultimately abandoned them didn't write many books on the topic.
In my experience codex has been better at details like this. But who knows working with an llm much like another engineer is all about how you ask and then how you iterate with the llm.
Models are trained with content scraped from the net, for the most part. The availability of content pertaining to those specs is almost nil, and of no SEO value. Ergo, models for the most part will only have a cursory knowledge of a spec that your browser will never be able to parse because that isn't the spec that won.
You can just also learn with the knowledge of 1996
Selfhtml exits it pretty easy to limit the scope of authoring language to a given HTML version and target browser. Your LLM should have no problem with german.
There were specs competing for adoption, but only tables (the old way) and CSS were actually adopted by browsers. So no point trying to use some other positioning technique.
Hmm you note that the problem is the LLM doesn’t have enough image context, but then zoom the image more?
Why not downscale the image and feed it as a second input so that entire planets fit into a patch and instruct it to use the doensampled image for coarse coordinate estimation
Maybe we could try asking Claude to generate code using <table>, <tr>, <td> for layout instead of relying on div + CSS. Feels like it could simplify things a lot.
Would this actually work, or am I missing something?
I think it probably gets you 80% but the last 20% of pixel perfection seems to evade Claude. But I'm pretty new to writing prompts so if you can nail it let me know and I'll link you in the post.
Tell claude to put the screenshot as an centered image with the body having the starry background on repeat. Then define the links as boxes over each icons with an old little tech trick called an image map.
"The plan is designed to ‘autoformalize’ the problem by using Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is incredibly important for getting good outputs from a coding agent, because it helps solve the context rot problem. Specifically, if you can write a good test when the model is most ‘lucid’, it will have an easier time later on because it is just solving the test instead of ‘building a feature’ or whatever high dimensional ask you originally gave it.
From here, Nori chugged away for the better part of half an hour in yolo mode while I went to do other things. And eventually I got a little pop up notification saying that it was done. It had written a playwright test that would open an html file, screenshot it, diff it with the original screenshot, and output the final result...
After trying a few ways to get the stars to line up perfectly, it just gave up and copied the screenshot in as the background image, then overlaid the rest of the HTML elements on top.
I’m tempted to give this a pass for a few reasons.
This obviously covers the original use case that tripped up Jonah.
It also is basically exactly what I asked the model to do — that is, give me a pixel perfect representation — so it’s kind of my fault that I was not clearer.
I’m not sure the model actually can get to pixel perfect any other way. The screengrab has artifacts. After all, I basically just used the default linux screenshot selection tool to get the original output, without even paying much attention to the width of the image.
If you ask the model to loosen the requirements for the exact screengrab, it does the right thing, but the pixel alignment is slightly off. The model included this as index_tiled.html in the repo, and you can see the pixel diff in one of the output images..."
A comparison would Codex would be good. I haven't done it with Codex, but when working through problems using ChatGPT, it does a great job when given screenshots.
I've tried doing stuff similar to the author, and it generally does not get better after the first attempt. I even tried supplying Claude with a delta view, ie. the difference in per-pixel output, along with the reference and current result, yet it was impossible for it to understand and remember the actual differences.
I have a very weird tangential nit to pick: gendering LLMs. I swear I'm not pushing any sort of gender agenda/discussion that can be had anytime anywhere else in the current age, but to me there is something quintessentially a-gendered about the output of a computer program.
Calling Claude (or GPT-5 or Gemini or my bash terminal for that matter) a "he" seems absurd to the point of hilarity.
Hm, Claude is a common male surname, especially in Europe. That plays into it. Also many people - including me - have personalised their AI chats, have given it names, even something resembling a personality (it's easy with prefix prompts). Why others do it, who knows, I do it because I find it a lot less frustrating when ChatGPT fucks up when it pretends to be a young adult female klutz.
Does it happen much with non-Claude models? If someone genders ChatGPT, it makes me worry that they're taking the character it's playing too literally. But if someone genders Claude, that seems pretty normal, given that it has a man's name.
Sounds like the setup for a sexist comedian's routine. "Y'know, ChatGPT is totally a woman because she reminds me of my wife. She thinks it knows everything and is convinced she's right, when she's totally full of shit! And what's the deal with airline food?" Swap the gender depending on your target audience.
In other languages, chairs have a gender, along with other everyday items like scissors and it doesn't especially make logical sense, although you can squint and tell a story as why something is the gender that's been assigned. Thus making the gender of AI simply a matter"that's just how things are".
Wasn't it now (end of 2025) that Dario Amodei said Claude (or LLMs in general) would be doing almost all programming work?
This article is my typical experience with LLM coding. Endless correction and handholding, and manual cleanup of subtle mistakes. With no long-term learning from them.
Kinda makes me livid, the amount of false hype coming out of the mouths of the stewards of these investor-subsidized LLM companies.
But they're amazing Google replacements, and learning tools. And once in a blue moon they ace a coding assignment and delight me.
He assembled all the assets, did a bunch of prompting prep, etc. The alignment was kinda the main job, and he would have had to do a bunch of cleanup after. If this was a freelance job a client was paying for, I'd definitely tell myself to save cost next time by not using AI.
In actual workflows someone would accept a very close reproduction and fix the small issues. Generally I use systems to get close enough to a scaffolding and / or make small incremental improvements and direct its design
This comment is missing the point. The real goal of all this is not to amaze. It's to create better software. Let's graduate past the amazement phase into the realism phase as soon as possible. What parts of my project is the LLM for? That is the real question worth asking.
Dang, can you explain how this is indignant or sensational?
Anthropic's leadership and researchers continue to this day to post messages saying engineering will be fully automated. I can go find recent messages on X if you'd like.
This forum is comprised mostly of engineers, who will be the most impacted if their vision of the world pans out.
YC depends on innovation capital to make money. If the means of production are centralized, how does YC make any money at all from engineers? Such a world will be vertically and horizontally integrated, not democratically spread for others to take advantage of.
Now I don't think that's what's going to happen, but that's what the messaging has been and continues to be from Anthropic's leadership, researchers, and ICs.
Why should we support companies like this?
We shouldn't we advocate for open models where any market participants can fully utilize and explore the competitive gradients?
I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here.
Furthermore, if this pans out like it seems it will - a set of three or four AI hyperscalers - we'll also be in the same situation we have today with the big tech hyperscalers.
Due to a lax regulatory environment, these companies put a ceiling on startup exits by funding internal competition, buying competitors, etc. I don't see how the situation will improve in an AI world.
If you're a capitalist, you want competition to be fierce and fair. You don't want concentration of power.
I can see how an Anthropic IC might not like this post, but this should be fairly reasonable for everyone else who would like to see more distribution of power.
It still seems you can make the front page posting these words as long as they're externally hosted. Or maybe it's the fact Anil is a bit of a celebrity:
Hey man, there's a world of difference between what's essentially a tweet (HN comment) and an article.
If you wanna make charged statements, at the very least substantiate them. (To be clear: I don't necessarily disagree with you, but you gotta admit your language is emotionally laden and lacks substance.)
I've been seeing a lot of Anthropic folks talking (rather gleefully) about ending our profession recently, and it's getting on my nerves.
I don't believe their timelines or unassailability. And even if our jobs do come to an end, I believe in work after work. I'm just not a fan of the almost smug assuredness or their apparent crusade against ICs.
Interesting. I just looked at the page source and it is in fact using a table layout. I always assumed it was an image map, which I assume would be even more obscure for the LLM.
We should check the Wayback Machine, but in my memory this was built with an image map. Maybe like, 10 years ago or something. I was googling around when writing this post and saw that there are folks still tasked with making sure it's up and running. I wonder if they migrated it to tables at some point in the last decade.
The statement is almost certainly made in jest, since it is obviously untrue. Sometimes adding silly artificial constraints can be a fun way to spark creativity.
Help, I can't recreate a website with AI! There's no other way, no way I could fix up some HTML code! Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree!
Somehow I suspect Claude Code (in an interactive session with trial, error, probing, critiquing, perusing, and all the other benefits you get) would do better. This example seems to assume Claude can do things in "one shot" (even the later attempts all seem to conceal information like it's a homework assignment).
That's not how to successfully use LLM's for coding in my experience. It is however perhaps a good demonstration of Claude's poor spatial reasoning skills. Another good demonstration of this is the twitch.tv/ClaudePlaysPokemon where Claude has been failing to beat pokemon for months now.
Not a homework assignment, and no deliberate attempt to conceal information, just very long and repetitive logs. A lot of the same "insights" so I just didn't provide them here.
> That's not how to successfully use LLM's for coding in my experience.
Yeah agree. I think I was just a little surprised it couldn't one-shot given the simplicity.
> Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot.
Why not use wget to mirror the website? Unless you're being sarcastic.
The stuff about not being able to download it is a bit of a joke and I don't think the tone landed with everybody haha. This was just an experiment to see if Claude could recreate a simple website from a screenshot, of course to your point you could download it if you wanted.
Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however:
"The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.".
This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a thing back then...
Here was its one-shot attempt at building the same type of layout (table based) with a screenshot and assets as input: https://i.imgur.com/fhdOLwP.png
Thanks, my friend. I added a strike through of the error, a correction, and credited you.
I'm keeping it in for now because people have made some good jokes about the mistake in the comments and I want to keep that context.
You bet, Fun post and writeup, took me a bit down memory lane. I built several sites with nested table-based layouts, 1x1 transparent gif files set to strange widths to get layouts to force certain sizes. Little tricks with repeating gradient backgrounds for fancy 'beveled' effects. Under construction GIFs, page counters, GUESTBOOKS!, Photoshop drop-shadows on everything. All the things, fond-times. One or two I haven't touched in 20 years, but keep online for my own time-capsule memory :)
“Photoshop drop-shadows on everything.” I just time traveled for a few second there. Thank you for this comment.
Don’t forget to slice it for a 3x3. (And to recreate it all if you want to change your background color…)
Good old 9-slice scaling, I don't miss it for one bit.
The failure mode here (Claude trying to satisfy rather than saying 'this is impossible with the constraints') shows up everywhere. We use it for security research - it'll keep trying to find exploits even when none exist rather than admit defeat. The key is building external validation (does the POC actually work?) rather than trusting the LLM's confidence.
Ah! I see the problem now! AI can't see shit, it's a statistical model not some form of human. It uses words, so like humans, it can say every shit it wants and it's true until you find out.
The number one rule of the internet is don't believe anything you read. This rule was lost in history unfortunately.
When reasoning about sufficiently complex mechanisms, you benefit from adopting the Intentional Stance regardless of whether the thing on the other side is "some form of human". For example, when I'm planning a competitive strategy, I'm reasoning about how $OTHER_FIRM might respond to my pricing changes, without caring whether there's a particular mental process on the other side
Don't get scared when neuroscience uncovers that human thoughts are just statistical models.
tahts wyh yuo cna sitll raed tihs setnence.
statistical models are the only way to solve the problem. nature did it too.
You're absolutely right!
Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.
I remember building really complex layouts w nested tables, and learning the hard way that going beyond 6 levels of nesting caused serious rendering performance problems in Netscape.
I remember seeing a co-worker stuck on trying to debug Netscape showing a blank page. When I looked at it, it wasn’t showing a blank page per se, it was just taking over a minute to render tables nested twelve deep. I deleted exactly half of them with no change to the layout or functionality, and it immediately started rendering in under a second.
Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?
> Six nesting levels for tables?
Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables.
As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.
Upromise. com -- a service for helping families save $ for college. Those layouts, which I painstakingly hand-crafted in HTML, caused the CTO to say "I didn't know you could do that with HTML", and was served to the company's first 10M customers.
Why not! We did this in 2024 for our website (1) to have zero CSS.
Still works, only Claude can not understand what those tables means.
1. https://www.tirreno.com
That's a fun trick, but please consider adding ARIA roles (e.g. role="presentation" to <table>, role="heading" aria-level="[number]" to the <font> elements used for headings) to make your site understandable by screen readers.
Your logo gets cut off in Firefox https://i.ibb.co/kbj5vw7/image.png
I'm on Firefox and when I right click and open image in new tab I see an svg file with pale blue text colour and cut-off lettering. The source of the svg suggests that the letters are drawn paths rather than a font.
Saving the svg file down and loading into Inkscape shows a grouped object with a frame and then letter forms. The letter forms are not fonts but a complete drawn path. So I think the chopping off of the descenders is a deliberate choice (which is fine if that is what's wanted).
The whole page looks narrow and long on my landfill android phone so the content is in the middle third of the browser but can pinch-zoom ok onto each 'cell' or section of text or the graphs.
Thanks to tirreno and reconnecting for posting this interesting page markup.
> Why not!
Responsive layout would be the biggest reason (mobile for one, but also a wider range of PC monitor aspect ratios these days than the 4:3 that was standard back then), probably followed by conflating the exact layout details with the content, and a separation of concerns / ease of being able to move things around.
I mean, it's a perfectly viable thing if these are not requirements and preferences that you and your system have. But it's pretty rare these days that an app or site can say "yeah, none of those matter to me the least bit".
I learned recently that this is still how a lot of email html get generated.
Apparently Outlook (the actual one, not the recent pretender) still uses some ancient WordHTML version as the renderer, so there isn’t much choice.
Fun fact: until Office 2007, outlook used IE’s engine for rendering html.
Oh yeah, recently I had to update a newsletter design like that and older versions of outlook still didn’t render properly.
It was relatively OK to deal with when the pages were created by coders themselves.
But then DreamWeaver came out, where you basically drew the entire page in 2D and it spat out some HTML tables that stitched it all back together again, and the freedom it gave our artists in drawing in 2D and not worrying about the output meant they went completely overboard with it and you'd get lots of tiny little slices everywhere.
Definitely glad those days are well behind us now!
wasn't it Fireworks that sliced the image originally. you'd then be able to open that export into Dreamworks for additional work. I didn't do that kind of design very long. Did Dreamworks get updated to allow the slicing directly bypassing Fireworks?
I yearn for those days. CSS was a mistake. Tables and DHTML is all one needs.
You jest, but it took forever to add somewhat intuitive layout mechanism to css which allowed you to do what could be done easily with html tables. Vertically centering a div inside another was really hard, and very few people understood the techniques you would use, instead of blindly copying them.
It was beyond irony that the recommended solution was to tell the browser to render your divs as a table.
CSS was a mistake? JavaScript was a mistake, specifically JavaScript frameworks.
JavaScript? HTML and HTTP were the real mistakes.
HTML and HTTP? TCP was the real mistake.
"In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and has widely been considered as a bad move."
Gosh, there was a website, where you submit a PSD + payment, and they spit out a sliced design. Initially tables, later, CSS. Life saver.
Y Combinator funded one such company, MarkupWand.[1] A friend is one of the co-founders.
1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/markupwand
And use a single px invisible gif to move things around.
But was Space Jam using multiple images or just one large image with and image map for links?
The author said he had the assets and gave them to Claude. It would be obvious if he had one large image for all the planets instead of individual ones.
Oh man, Photoshop still has the slice feature and it makes the most horrendous table-based layout possible. It's beautiful.
Off topic, but you have used imgur as your image hosting site, which cannot be viewed in the UK. If you want all readers to be able to see and understand your points, please could you use a more universally reachable host?
Please reach out to your nearest government official to tell them what do you think about the Imgur not working in your country.
Have done multiple times. Im not asking op to change, just to consider ther may be a large chunk of readers who cant see what they are referencing if they choose Imgur.
Please, let us import this ban into the US. The site hasn't been usable in almost ten years, but people keep insisting on dragging the corpse back out the grave.
Which one could be used so everybody can read it? So many different autocratic systems to think about...
I think it's easier if you adapt and get a VPN or a new government.
Yes tried that. Getting a new government was a bit tricky and work policy doesnt allow personal VPNs, so was just letting OP know that if they choose to use Imgur then a large chunk of the readers wont know what they are talking about.
Why is that?
Why is what? The post is fully self explanitory. If the OP chooses to use Imgur, then a large chunk of the readers will not know what they are talking about.
I cut my teeth developing for the web using GoLive and will never forget how they used tables to layout a page from that tool…
Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM. On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don't support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn't let Claude write the code. With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:
- Read an .icc file from disk
- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)
- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs
The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).
Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
Certainly if a human wrote code that solved this problem, and a second human copied and tweaked it slightly for their use case, we would have a word for them.
Would we use the same word if two different humans wrote code that solved two different problems, but one part of each problem was somewhat analogous to a different aspect of a third human's problem, and the third human took inspiration from those parts of both solutions to create code that solved a third problem?
What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
I think "plagiarism", "inspiration", and just "learning from" fall on some continuous spectrum. There are clear differences when you zoom out, but they are in degree, and it's hard to set a hard boundary. The key is just to make sure we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created.
Ask for something like "a first person shooter using software rendering", and search github for the function names for the rendering functions. Using Copilot I found code simply lifted from implementations of Doom, except that "int" was replaced with "int32_t" and similar.
It's also fun to tell Copilot that the code will violate a license. It will seemingly always tell you it's fine. Safe legal advice.
And this is just the stuff you notice.
1) Verbatin copy is first-order plagiarism.
2a) Second-order plagiarism of written text would be replacing words with synonyms. Or taking a book paragraph by paragraph and for each one of them, rephrasing it in your own words. Yes, it might fool automated checkers but the structure would still be a copy of the original book. And most importantly, it would not contain any new information. No new positive-sum work was done. It would have no additional value.
Before LLMs almost nobody did this because the chance that it would help in a lawsuit vs the amount of work was not a good tradeoff. Now it is. But LLMs can do "better":
2b) A different kind of second-order plagiarism is using multiple sources and plagiarizing each of them only in part. Find multiple books on the same topic, take 1 chapter from each and order them in a coherent manner. Make it more granular. Find paragraphs or phrases which fit into the structure of your new book but are verbatim from other books. See how granular you can make it.
The trick here is that doing this by hand is more work than just writing your own book. So nobody did it and copyright law does not really address this well. But with LLMs, it can be automated. You can literally instruct an LLM to do this and it will do it cheaper than any human could. However, how LLMs work internally is yet different:
n) Higher-order plagiarism is taking multiple source books, identifying patterns, and then reproducing them in your "new" book.
If the patterns are sufficiently complex, nobody will ever be able to prove what specifically you did. What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data.
The point is this ability to detect and reproduce patterns is an impressive innovation but it's built on top of the work of hundreds of millions[0] of humans whose work was used without consent. The work done by those employed by the LLM companies is minuscule compared to that. Yet all of the reward goes to them.
Not to mention LLMs completely defear the purpose of (A)GPL. If you can take AGPL code and pass it through a sufficiently complex mechanical transformation that the output does the same thing but copyright no longer applies, then free software is dead. No more freedom to inspect and modify.
[0]: Github alone has 100 million users ( https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/github-statistics/ ) and we have reason to believe all of their data was used in training.
If a human did 2a or 2b we would think that a larger infraction than (1) because it shows intent to obfuscate the origins.
As for your free software is dead argument: I think it is worse than that: it takes away the one payment that free software authors get: recognition. If a commercial entity can take the code, obfuscate it and pass it off as their own copyrighted work to then embrace and extend it then that is the worst possible outcome.
> shows intent to obfuscate the origins
Good point. Reminds me of how if you poison one person, you go to prison, but when a company poisons thousands, it gets a fine... sometimes.
> it takes away the one payment that free software authors get: recognition
I keep flip-flopping on this. I did most of my open source work not caring about recognition but about the principles of GPL and later AGPL. However, I came to realize it was a mistake - people don't judge you by the work you actually do but by the work you appear to do. I have zero respect for people who do something just for the approval of others but I am aware of the necessity of making sure people know your value.
One thing is certain: credit/recognition affect all open source code, user rights (e.g. to inspect and modify) affect only the subset under (A)GPL.
Both are bad in their own right.
You make several good points, and I appreciate that they appear well thought out.
> What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data.
At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently?
> then free software is dead. No more freedom to inspect and modify.
It seems to me that depends on the ideological framing. Consider a (still entirely hypothetical) world where anyone can receive approximately any software they wish with little more than a Q&A session with an expert AI agent. Rather than free software being dead, such a scenario would appear to obviate the vast majority of needs that free software sets out to serve in the first place.
It seems a bit like worrying that free access to a comprehensive public transportation service would kill off a ride sharing service. It probably would, and the end result would also probably be a net benefit to humanity.
> At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently?
Copyright law... automated transformation preserves copyright. It makes the output a derivative of the input.
Yes that's what the law currently says. I'm asking if it ought to say that in this specific scenario.
Previously there was no way for a machine to do large swaths of things that have now recently become possible. Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.
This is the first technology in human history which only works if you use an exorbitant amount of other people's work (without their consent, often without even their knowledge) to automate their work.
There have been previous tech revolutions but they were based on independent innovation.
> Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.
Perhaps using copyright law for software and other engineering work might have been a mistake but it worked to a degree me and most devs were OK with.
Sidenote: There is no _one_ copyright law. IANAL but reportedly, for example datasets are treated differently in the US vs EU, with greater protection for the work that went into creating a database in the EU. And of course, China does what is best for China at a given moment.
There's 2 approaches:
1) Either we follow the current law. Its spirit and (again IANAL) probably the letter says that mechanical transformation preserves copyright. Therefore the LLMs and their output must be licensed under the same license as the training data (if all the training data use compatible licenses) or are illegal (if they mixed incompatible licenses). The consequence is that very roughly a) most proprietary code cannot be used for training, b) using only permissive code gives you a permissively licensed model and output and c) permissive and copyleft code can be combined, as long as the resulting model and output is copyleft. It still completely ignores attribution though but this is a compromise I would at least consider being OK with.
(But if I don't get even credit for 10 years of my free work being used to build this innovation, then there should be a limit on how much the people building the training algorithms get out of it as well.)
2) We design a new law. Legality and morality are, sadly, different and separate concepts. Now, call me a naive sucker, but I think legality should try to approximate morality as closely as possible, only deviating due to the real-world limitations of provability. (E.g. some people deserve to die but the state shouldn't have the right to kill them because the chance of error is unacceptably high.) In practice, the law is determined by what the people writing it can get away with before the people forced to follow it revolt. I don't want a revolution, but I think for example a bloody revolution is preferable to slavery.
Either way, there are established processes for handling both violations of laws and for writing new laws. This should not be decided by private for-profit corporations seeing whether they can get away with it scot-free or trembling that they might have to pay a fine which is a near-zero fraction of their revenue, with almost universally no repercussions for their owners.
> What justifies treating human output differently?
Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not.
One angle:
The real issue is how this is made possible. Imagine an AI being created by a lone genius or a team of really good programmers and researchers by sitting down and just writing the code. From today's POV, it would be almost unimaginably impressive but that is how most people envisioned AI being created a few decades ago (and maybe as far as 5 years ago). These people would obviously deserve all the credit for their invaluable work and all the income from people using their work. (At least until another team does the same, then it's competition as normal.)
But that's not how AI is being created. What the programmers and researchers really do it create a highly advanced lossy compression algorithm which then takes nearly all publicly available human knowledge (disregarding licenses/consent) and creates a model of it which can reproduce both the first-order data (duh) and the higher-order patterns in it (cool). Do they still deserve all the credit and all the income? What if there's 1k researchers and programmers working on the compression algorithm (= training algorithm) and 1B people whose work ("content") is compressed by it (= used to train it). I will freely admit that the work done to build the algorithm is higher skilled than most of the work done by the 1B people. Maybe even 10x or 100x more expensive. But if you multiply those numbers (1k * 100 vs 1B), you have to come to the conclusion that the 1B people deserve the vast majority of the credit and the vast majority of the income generated by the combined work. (And notice when another team creates a competing model based on the same data, the share by the 1B stays the same and the 1k have to compete for their fraction.)
Another angle:
If you read a book, learn something from it and then apply the knowledge to make money, you currently don't pay a share to the author of the book. But you paid a fixed price for the book, hopefully. We could design a system where books are available for free, we determine how much the book helped you make that money, and you pay a proportional share to the author. This is not as entirely crazy as it might sound. When you cause an injury to someone, a court will determine how much each party involved is liable and there are complex rules (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_and_several_liability) determining the subsequent exchange of money. We could in theory do the same for material you learn from (though the fractions would probably be smaller than 1%). We don't because it would be prohibitively time consuming, very invasive, and often unprovable unless you (accidentally) praise a specific blog post or say you learned a technique from a book. Instead, we use this thing called market capitalism where the author sets a price and people either buy the book or not (depending on whether they think it's worth it for them), some of them make no money as a result, some make a lot, and we (choose to) believe that in aggregate, the author is fairly compensated.
Even if your blog is available for anyone to read freely, you get compensated in alternative ways by people crediting you and/or by building an audience you can influence to a degree.
With LLMs, there is no way to get the companies training the models to credit you or build you an audience. And even if they pay for the books they use for training, I don't believe they pay enough. The price was determined before the possibility of LLM training was known to the author and the value produced by a sufficiently sophisticated AI, perhaps AGI (which they openly claim to want to create) is effectively unlimited. The only way to compensate authors fairly is to periodically evaluate how much revenue the model attracted and pay a dividend to the authors as long as that model continues to be used.
Best of all, unlike with humans, the inner workings of a computer model, even a very complex one, can be analyzed in their entirety. So it should be possible to track (fractional) attribution throughout the whole process. There's just no incentive for the companies to invest into the tooling.
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> approximately any software they wish with little more than a Q&A session with an expert AI agent
Making software is not just about writing code, it's about making decisions. Not just understanding problem and designing a solution but also picking tradeoffs and preferences.
I don't think most people are gonna do this just like most people today don't go to a program's settings and tweak every slider/checkbox/dropdown to their liking. They will at most say they want something exactly like another program with a few changes. And then it's clearly based on that original program and all the work performed to find out the users' preferences/likes/dislikes/workflows which remain unchanged.
But even if they genuinely recreate everything, then if it's done by an LLM, it's still based on work of others as per the argument above.
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> the end result would also probably be a net benefit to humanity.
Possibly. But in the case of software fully written by sufficiently advanced LLMs, that net benefit would be created only by using the work of a hundred million or possibly a billion of people for free and without (quite often against) their consent.
Forced work without compensation is normally called slavery. (The only difference is that our work has already been done and we're "only" forced to not be able to prevent LLM companies from using it despite using licenses which by their intent and by the logic above absolutely should.)
The real question is how to achieve this benefit without exploiting people.
And don't forget such a model will not be offered for free to everyone as a public good. Not even to those people whose data was used to train it. It will be offered as a paid service. And most of the revenue won't even go to the researchers and programmers who worked on the model directly and who made it possible. It will go to the people who contributed the least (often zero) technical work.
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This comment (and its GP), which contains arguments I have not seen anywhere else, was written over an hour long train ride. I could have instead worked remotely to make more than enough money to pay for the train ride. Instead, I write this training data which will be compressed and some patterns from it reproduced, allowing people I will never know and who will never know me to make an amount of money I have no chance quantifying and get nothing from. Now, I have to work some other hour to pay for the train ride. Make of that what you will.
Human time is certainly valuable to a particular human. However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine.
I think it's worth remembering that IP law is generally viewed (at least legally) as existing for the net benefit of society as opposed to for ethical reasons. Certainly many authors feel like they have (or ought to have) some moral right to control their work but I don't believe that was ever the foundation of IP law.
Nor do I think it should be! If we are to restrict people's actions (ex copying) then it should be for a clear and articulable net societal benefit. The value proposition of IP law is that it prevents degenerate behavior that would otherwise stifle innovation. My question is thus, how do these AI developments fit into that?
So I completely agree that (for example) laundering a full work more or less verbatim through an AI should not be permissible. But when it comes to the higher order transformations and remixes that resemble genuine human work I'm no longer certain. I definitely don't think that "human exceptionalism" makes for a good basis either legally or ethically.
Regarding FOSS licenses, I'm again asking how AI relates back to the original motivations. Why does FOSS exist in the first place? What is it trying to accomplish? A couple ideological motivations that come to mind are preventing someone building on top and then profiting, or ensuring user freedom and ability to tinker.
Yes, the current crop of AI tools seem to pose an ideological issue. However! That's only because the current iteration can't truly innovate and also (as you note) the process still requires lots of painstaking human input. That's a far cry from the hypothetical that I previously posed.
One of your remarks regarding attribution and compensation goes back to 'Xanadu' by the way, if you are not familiar with it that might be worth reading up on (Ted Nelson). He obviously did this well before the current AI age but a lot of the ideas apply.
A meta-comment:
I absolutely love your attention to detail in this discussion and avoiding taking 'the easy way out' from some of the more hairy concept embedded. This is exactly the kind of interaction that I love HN for, and it is interesting how this thread seems to bring out the best in you at the same time that it seems to bring out the worst in others.
Most likely they are responding as strongly as they do because they've bought into this matter to a degree that they are passing off works that they did not create as their own novel output, they got paid for it and they - like a religious person - are now so invested in this that it became their crutch and a part of their identity.
If you have another train ride to make I'd love for you to pick apart that argument and to refute it.
> It's also fun to tell Copilot that the code will violate a license. It will seemingly always tell you it's fine. Safe legal advice.
Perfectly embodies the AI "startup" mentality. Nice.. /s
They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
but as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produce reasonable-looking output.
Programmers are not expected to add an addendum to every file listing all the books, articles, and conversations they've had that have influenced the particular code solution. LLMs are trained on far more sources that influence their code suggestions, but it seems like we actually want a higher standard of attribution because they (arguably) are incapable of original thought.
It's not uncommon, in a well-written code base, to see documentation on different functions or algorithms with where they came from.
This isn't just giving credit; it's valuable documentation.
If you're later looking at this function and find a bug or want to modify it, the original source might not have the bug, might have already fixed it, or might have additional functionality that is useful when you copy it to a third location that wasn't necessary in the first copy.
This is why I'm still, even after decades of seeing it fail in the marketplace, a fan of literate programming.
If the problem you ask it to solve has only one or a few examples, or if there are many cases of people copy pasting the solution, LLMs can and will produce code that would be called plagiarism if a human did it.
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Do you have a source for that being the key difference? Where did you learn your words, I don’t see the names of your teachers cited here. The English language has existed a while, why aren’t you giving a citation every time you use a word that already exists in a lexicon somewhere? We have a name for people who don’t coin their own words for everything and rip off the words that other painstakingly evolved over a millennia of history. Find your own graphemes.
What a profoundly bad faith argument. We all understand that singular words are public domain, they belong to everyone. Yet when you arrange them in a specific pattern, of which there are infinite possibilities, you create something unique. When someone copies that arrangement wholesale and claims they were the first, that’s what we refer to as plagiarism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9huNI5sBd8
It’s not bad faith argument. It’s an attempt to shake thinking that is profoundly stuck by taking that thinking to an absurd extreme. Until that’s done, quite a few people aren’t able to see past the assumptions they don’t know they making. And by quite a few people I mean everyone, at different times. A strong appreciation for the absurd will keep a person’s thinking much sharper.
>> They key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
> [i want to] shake thinking that is profoundly stuck [because they] aren’t able to see past the assumptions they don’t know they making
what is profoundly stuck, and what are the assumptions?
That your brain training on all the inputs it sees and creating output is fundamentally more legitimate than a computer doing the same thing.
Copyright isn't some axiom, but to quote wikipedia: "Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized."
It's a tool to incentivse human creative expression.
Thus it's entirely sensible to consider and treat the output from computers and humans differently.
Especially when you consider large differences between computers and humans, such as how trivial it is to create perfect duplicates of computer training.
It is possible that the concept of intellectual property could be classified as a mistake of our era by the history teachers of future generations.
Intellectual property is a legal concept; plagiarism is ethical. We’re discussing the latter.
This particular user does that all the time. It's really tiresome.
It’s tiresome to see unexamined assumptions and self-contradictions tossed out by a community that can and often does do much better. Some light absurdism often goes further and makes clear that I’m not just trying to setup a strawman since I’ve already gone and made a parody of my own point.
In case of LLMs, due to RAG, very often it's not just learning but almost direct real-time plagiarism from concrete sources.
Isn't RAG used for your code rather than other people's code? If I ask it to implement some algorithm, I'd be very surprised if RAG was involved.
RAG and LLMs are not the same thing, but 'Agents' incorporate both.
Maybe we could resolve the bit of a conundrum by the op in requiring 'agents' to give credit for things if they did rag them or pull them off the web?
It still doesn't resolve the 'inherent learning' problem.
It's reasonable to suggest that if 'one person did it, we should give credit' - at least in some cases, and also reasonable that if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply.
But a couple of considerations:
- It may not be that common for an LLM to 'see one thing one time' and then have such an accurate assessment of the solution. It helps, but LLMs tend not to 'learn' things that way.
- Some people might consider this the OSS dream - any code that's public is public and it's in the public domain. We don't need to 'give credit' to someone because they solved something relatively arbitrary - or - if they are concerned with that, then we can have a separate mechanism for that, aka they can put it on Github or Wikipedia even, and then we can worry about 'who thought of it first' as a separate consideration. But in terms of Engineering application, that would be a bit of a detractor.
> if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply.
I think it should.
Sure, if you make a small amount of money and divide it among the 1000 people who deserve credit due to their work being used to create ("train") the model, it might be too small to bother.
But if actual AGI is achieved, then it has nearly infinite value. If said AGI is built on top of the work of the 1000 people, then almost infinity divided by 1000 is still a lot of money.
Of course, the real numbers are way larger, LLMs were trained on the work of at least 100M but perhaps over a billion of people. But the value they provide over a long enough timespan is also claimed to be astronomical (evidenced by the valuations of those companies). It's not just their employees who deserve a cut but everyone whose work was used to train them.
> Some people might consider this the OSS dream
I see the opposite. Code that was public but protected by copyleft can now be reused in private/proprietary software. All you need to do it push it through enough matmuls and some nonlinearities.
- I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit - or certainly 'financial remuneration' because they wrote some arbitrary piece of code.
That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.
- Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical. Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft. It's a legit perspective obviously, but it hasn't bee representative for 20 years.
Whatever we do with AI, we already have a basic understanding of public domain, at least we can start from there.
> I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit
There's 8B people on the planet, probably ~100M can code to some degree[0]. Something only 1k people write is actually pretty rare.
Where would you draw the line? How many out of how many?
If I take a leaked bit of Google or MS or, god forbid, Oracle code and manage to find a variation of each small block in a few other projects, does it mean I can legally take the leaked code and use it for free?
Do you even realize to what lengths the tech companies went just a few years ago to protect their IP? People who ever even glanced at leaked code were prohibited from working on open source reimplementations.
> That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.
1) Public domain is a legal concept, it has 0 relevance to morality.
2) Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?
> Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical.
This sentence seems highly ideological. Linux is GPL, in fact, probably most SW on my non-work computer is GPL. It is very practical and works much better than commercial alternatives for me.
> Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft.
Where did you get this number? Using search engines, I get 20-30%.
[0]: It's the number of github users, though there's reportedly only ~25M professional SW devs, many more people can code but don't professionaly.
> we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created
Indeed, and up until the advent of 'AI' we did. But that incentive is being killed right now and I don't see any viable replacement on the horizon.
Thanks for writing this - love the way u explain the pov. I wish people would consider this angle more
> What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans?
What if it was just a single person? I take it you didn't read any of the code in the ocaml vibe pr that was posted a bit ago? The one where Claude copied non just implementation specifics, but even the copyright headers from a named, specific person.
It's clear that you can have no idea if the magic black box is copying from a single source, or from many.
So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it. Are you really arguing that's ok?
> So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it.
It is actually worse: plagiarism is fine if I'm shielded from such claims by using a digital mixer. When criminals use crypto tumblers to hide their involvement we tend to see that as proof of intent, not as absolution.
LLMs are copyright tumblers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code.
Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
We can solve that question in an intuitive way: if human input is not what is driving the output then it would be sufficient to present it with a fraction of the current inputs, say everything up to 1970 and have it generate all of the input data from 1970 onwards as output.
If that does not work then the moment you introduce AI you cap their capabilities unless humans continue to create original works to feed the AI. The conclusion - to me, at least - is that these pieces of software regurgitate their inputs, they are effectively whitewashing plagiarism, or, alternatively, their ability to generate new content is capped by some arbitrary limit relative to the inputs.
This is known as the data processing inequality. Non-invertible functions can not create more information than what is available in their inputs: https://blog.blackhc.net/2023/08/sdpi_fsvi/. Whatever arithmetic operations are involved in laundering the inputs by stripping original sources & references can not lead to novelty that wasn't already available in some combination of the inputs.
Neural networks can at best uncover latent correlations that were already available in the inputs. Expecting anything more is basically just wishful thinking.
Using this reasoning, would you argue that a new proof of a theorem adds no new information that was not present in the axioms, rules of inference and so on?
If so, I'm not sure it's a useful framing.
For novel writing, sure, I would not expect much truly interesting progress from LLMs without human input because fundamentally they are unable to have human experiences, and novels are a shadow or projection of that.
But in math – and a lot of programming – the "world" is chiefly symbolic. The whole game is searching the space for new and useful arrangements. You don’t need to create new information in an information-theoretic sense for that. Even for the non-symbolic side (say diagnosing a network issue) of computing, AIs can interact with things almost as directly as we can by running commands so they are not fundamentally disadvantaged in terms of "closing the loop" with reality or conducting experiments.
Sound deductive rules of logic can not create novelty that exceeds the inherent limits of their foundational axiomatic assumptions. You can not expect novel results from neural networks that exceed the inherent information capacity of their training corpus & the inherent biases of the neural network (encoded by its architecture). So if the training corpus is semantically unsound & inconsistent then there is no reason to expect that it will produce logically sound & semantically coherent outputs (i.e. garbage inputs → garbage outputs).
Maybe? But it also seems like you are that you are not accounting for new information at inference time. Let's pretend I agree the LLM is a plagiarism machine that can produce no novelty in and of itself that didn't come from what it was trained on, and produces mostly garbage (I only half agree lol, and I think "novelty" is under-specified here).
When I apply that machine (with its giant pool of pirated knowledge) _to my inputs and context_ I can get results applicable to my modestly novel situation which is not in the training data. Perhaps the output is garbage. Naturally if my situation is way out of distribution I cannot expect very good results.
But I often don't care if the results are garbage some (or even most!) of the time if I have a way to ground-truth whether they are useful to me. This might be via running a compile, a test suite, a theorem prover or mk1 eyeball. Of course the name of the game is to get agents to do this themselves and this is now fairly standard practice.
I'm not here to convince you whether Markov chains are helpful for your use cases or not. I know from personal experience that even in cases where I have a logically constrained query I will receive completely nonsensical responses¹.
¹https://chatgpt.com/share/69367c7a-8258-8009-877c-b44b267a35...
> Here is a correct, standard correction:
It does this all the time, but as often as not then outputs nonsense again, just different nonsense, and if you keep it running long enough it starts repeating previous errors (presumably because some sliding window is exhausted).
That's been my general experience and that was the most recent example. People keep forgetting that unless they can independently verify the outputs they are essentially paying OpenAI for the privilige of being very confidently gaslighted.
It would be a really nice exercise - for which I unfortunately do not have the time - to have a non-trivial conversation with the best models of the day and then to rigorously fact-check every bit of output to determine the output quality. Judging from my own (probably not a representative sample) experience it would be a very meager showing.
I use AI as a means of last resort only now and then mostly as a source of inspiration rather than a direct tool aiming to solve an issue. And like that it has been useful on occasion, but it has at least as often been a tremendous waste of time.
This is simply not true.
Modern LLMs are trained by reinforcement learning where they try to solve a coding problem and receive a reward if it succeeds.
Data Processing Inequalities (from your link) aren't relevant: the model is learning from the reinforcement signal, not from human-written code.
Ok, then we can leave the training data out of the input, everybody happy.
Theoretical "proofs" of limitations like this are always unhelpful because they're too broad, and apply just as well to humans as they do to LLMs. The result is true but it doesn't actually apply any limitation that matters.
You're confused about what applies to people & what applies to formal systems. You will continue to be confused as long as you keep thinking formal results can be applied in informal contexts.
I like your test. Should we also apply to specific humans?
We all stand on the shoulders of giants and learn by looking at others’ solutions.
That's true. But if we take your implied rebuttal then current level AI would be able to learn from current AI as well as it would learn from humans, just like humans learn from other humans. But so far that does not seem to be the case, in fact, AI companies do everything they can to avoid eating their own tail. They'd love eating their own tail if it was worth it.
To me that's proof positive they know their output is mangled inputs, they need that originality otherwise they will sooner or later drown in nonsense and noise. It's essentially a very complex game of Chinese whispers.
Equally, of course, all six year olds need to be trained by other six year olds; we must stop this crutch of using adult teachers
Beautiful, thank you.
I share that perspective.
Excellent observation.
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I think my track record belies your very low value and frankly cowardly comment. If you have something to say at least do it under your real username instead of a throwaway.
The whole "reproduces training data vebatim" is a red herring.
It reproduces _patterns from the training data_, sometimes including verbatim phrases.
The work (to discover those patterns, to figure out what works and what does not, to debug some obscure heisenbug and write a blog post about it, ...) was done by humans. Those humans should be compensated for their work, not owners of mega-corporations who found a loophole in copyright.
Pick up a book about programming from seventies or eighties that was unlikely to be scanned and feed into LLM. Take a task from it and ask LLM to write a program from it that even a student can solve within 10 minutes. If the problem was not really published before, LLM fails spectacularly.
This does not appear to be true. Six months ago I created a small programming language. I had LLMs write hundreds of small programs in the language, using the parser, interpreter, and my spec as a guide for the language. The vast majority of these programs were either very close or exactly what I wanted. No prior source existed for the programming language because I created it whole cloth days earlier.
Obviously you accidentally recreated a language from the 70s :P
(I created a template language for JSON and added branching and conditionals and realized I had a whole programming language. Really proud of my originality until i was reading Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines and found out I reinvented TRAC, and to some extent, XSLT. Anyway LLMs are very good at reasoning about it because it can be constrained by a JSON schema. People who think LLMs only regurgitate haven't given it a fair shot)
FWIW, I think a JSON-based XSLT-like thing sounds far more enjoyable to use than actual XSLT, so I'd encourage you to show it off.
Languages with reasonable semantics are rather similar and LLMs are good at detecting that and adapting from other languages.
Sounds like creativity and intelligence to me.
I think the key is that the LLM is having no trouble mapping from one "embedding" of the language to another (the task they are best performers at!), and that appears extremely intelligent to us humans, but certainly is not all there's to intelligence.
But just take a look at how LLMs struggle to handle dynamical, complex systems such as the "vending machine" paper published some time ago. Those kind of tasks, which we humans tend to think of as "less intelligent" than say, converting human language to a C++ implementation, seem to have some kind of higher (or at least, different) complexity than the embedding mapping done by LLMs. Maybe that's what we typically refer to as creativity? And if so, modern LLMs certainly struggle with that!
Quite sci-fi that we have created a "mind" so alien we struggle to even agree on the word to define what it's doing :)
It's telling that you can't actually provide a single concrete example - because, of course, anyone skilled with LLMs would be able to trivially solve any such example within 10 minutes.
Perhaps the occasional program that relies heavily on precise visual alignment will fail - but I dare say if we give the LLM the same grace we'd give a visually impaired designer, it can do exactly as well.
I recently asked an LLM to give me one of the most basic and well-documented algorithms in the world: a blocked matrix multiply. It's essentially a few nested loops and some constants for the block size.
It failed massively, spitting out garbage code, where the comments claimed to use blocking access patterns, but the code did not actually use them at all.
LLMs are, frankly, nearly useless for programming. They may solve a problem every once in a while, but once you look at the code, you notice it's either directly plagiarized or bad quality (or both, I suppose, in the latter case).
Sometimes its generated, and many times its not. Trivial to denote, but its been deemed non of your business.
You've done this? I would love to read more about it
> that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code.
What about humans? Are humans capable of producing completely original code or ideas or thoughts?
As the saying goes, if you want to create something from scratch, you have to start by inventing the universe.
Human mind works by noticing patterns and applying them in different contexts.
I have a very anecdotal, but interesting, counterexample.
I recently asked Gemini 3 Pro to create an RSS feed reader type of experience by using XSLT to style and layout an OPML file. I specifically wanted it to use a server-side proxy for CORS, pass through caching headers in the proxy to leverage standard HTTP caching, and I needed all feed entries for any feed in the OPML to be combined into a single chronological feed.
It initially told multiple times that it wasn't possible (it also reminded me that Google is getting rid of XSLT). Regardless, after reiterating that it is possible multiple times it finally decided to make a temporary POC. That POC worked on the first try, with only one follow up to standardize date formatting with support for Atom and RSS.
I obviously can't say the code was novel, though I would be a bit surprised if it trained on that task enough for it to remember roughly the full implementation and still claimed it was impossible.
Why do you believe that to be a counterexample? In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input, the question is really how large the largest re-usable fragment was and whether or not barring some transformations you could trace it back to the original. I've done some experiments along the same lines to see what it spits out and what I noticed is that from example to example the programming style changed drastically, to the point that I suspect that it was mimicking even the style and not just the substance of the input data, and this over chunks of code long enough that it would definitely clear the bar for plagiarism.
> In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input
Yes, and Shakespeare merely copied the existing 26 letters of the English alphabet. What magical process do you think students are using when they read and re-combine learned examples to solve assignments?
This same argument has now been made a couple of times in this thread (in different guises) and does absolutely nothing to move the conversation forward.
Words and letters are not copyrightable patterns in and of themselves. It is the composition of words and letters that we consider to be original creations and 'the bard' put them in a meaningful and original order not seen before, which established his reputation as a playwright.
I think the burden of proof is on the people making the original claim (that LLMs are indeed spitting out original code).
No, the thing needing proof is the novel idea: that LLMs can produce original code.
LLMs can definitely produce original other stuff: ask it to create an original poem and on an extremely specific niche subject and it will do so. You can specify the niche subject to the point where it is incredibly unlikely that there is a poem on that subject in its training data, and it will still produce an original poem on that subject [0]. The well-known "otter using wifi on a plane" series of images [1] is another example: this is not in the training data (well, it is now, because well-known, but you get the idea).
Is there something unique about code, that is different from language (or images), that would make it impossible for an LLM to produce original code? I don't believe so, but I'm willing to be convinced.
I think this switches the burden of proof: we know LLMs can produce original content in other contexts. Why would they not be able to create original code?
[0] Ever curious, I tested this assumption. I got Claude to write an original limerick about goats oiling their beards with olive oil, which was the first reasonable thing I could think of as a suitably niche subject. I googled the result and could not find anything close to it. I then asked it to produce another limerick on the same subject, and it produced a different limerick, so obviously not just repeating training data.
[1] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in...
No, it transformed your prompt. Another person giving it the same prompt will get the same result when starting from the same state. f('your prompt here') is a transformation of your prompt based on hidden state.
This is also true of humans, see every debate on free will ever.
The trick, of course, is getting to the exact same starting state.
This just reeks of a lack of understanding of how transformers work. Unlike Markov Chains that can only regurgitate known sequences, transformers can actually make new combinations.
What's your proof that the average college student can produce original code? I'm reasonably certain I can get an LLM to write something that will pass any test that the average college student can, as far as that goes.
I'm not asking about averages. I'm asking about any. There is no need to perform an academic research study to prove that humans are capable of writing original code because the existence of our conversation right now is the counter-example to disprove the negation.
Yes, it is true that a lot of humans remix existing code. But not all. It has yet to be proven that any LLM is doing something more than remixing code.
I would submit as evidence to this idea (LLMs are not capable of writing original code) the fact that not a single company using LLM-based AI coding has developed a novel product that has outpaced its competition. In any category. If AI really makes people "10x" more productive, then companies that adopted AI a year ago should be 10 years ahead of their competition. Substitute any value N > 1 you want and you won't see it. Indeed, given the stories we're seeing of the massive amounts of waste that is occurring within AI startups and companies adopting AI, it would suggest that N < 1.
> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
What do you mean? The programmers work is literally combining the existing patterns into solutions for problems.
> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
I don’t think it’s fair to call someone who used Stack Overflow to find a similar answer with samples of code to copy to their project an asshole.
Who brought Stack Overflow up? Stack Overflow does not magically generate code, someone has to actually provide it first.
I generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit.
Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.
Stack Overflow deals with that issue by having a license agreement.
GitHub, Bitbucket, GCE, AWS…all have licensing agreements for user contributions which the user flagged as “public” so I’m not exactly clear of your point if you are holding SO up as a bastion of intellectual property rights different from the other places LLM training sets were scraped from.
I was not the person that introduced SO to the discussion.
To be fair, their license agreement is pretty much impossible to enforce.
It has been for the last 15 years.
Using stack overflow recklessly is definitely asshole behavior.
Recklessly is a strong word. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your comment in good faith.
How do you describe the “reckless” use of information?
Software engineer? You think I cite all the code I’ve ever seen before when I reproduce it? That I even remember where it comes from?
You don't?
If you reproduce something, usually you have to check the earlier implementation for it and copy it over. This would inevitably require you to look at the license and author of said code.
Assuming of course, you're talking about nontrivial functionality, because obviously we're not talking about trivial one-liners etc.
>we probably would have a word for them
Student? Good learner? Pretty much what everyone does can be boiled down to reading lots of other code that’s been written and adapting it to a use case. Sure, to some extent models are regurgitating memorized information, but for many tasks they’re regurgitating a learned method of doing something and backfilling the specifics as needed— the memorization has been generalized.
This is why ragebait is chosen as the word of 2025.
> took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case
Aka software engineering.
> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
Humans do this all the time.
Are you saying that every piece of code you have ever written contains a full source list of every piece of code you previously read to learn specific languages, patterns, etc?
Or are you saying that every piece of code you ever wrote was 100% original and not adapted from any previous codebase you ever worked in or any book / reference you ever read?
While I generally agree with you, this "LLM is a human" comparisons really are tiresome I feel. It hasn't been proven and I don't know how many other legal issued could have solved if adding "like a human" made it okay. Google v Oracle? "oh, you've never learned an API??!?" or take the original Google Books controversy - "its reading books and memorizing them, like humans can". I do agree its different but I don't like this line of argument at all.
I agree, that's why I was trying to point out that saying "if a person did that we'd have a word for them" is useless. They are not people, and people don't behave like that anyway. It adds nothing to the discussion.
What's with the bad takes in this thread. That's two strawmen in one comment, it's getting a bit crowded.
Or the original point doesn't actually hold up to basic scrutiny and is indistinguishable from straw itself.
HN has guidelines for a reason.
You're adhering to an excess of rules, methinks!
The original point, that LLMs are plagiarising inputs, is a very common and common sense opinion.
There are court cases where this is being addressed currently, and if you think about how LLMs operate, a reasonable person typically sees that it looks an awful lot like plagiarism.
If you want to claim it is not plagiarism, that requires a good argument, because it is unclear that LLMs can produce novelty, since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.
I need you to prove to me that it's not plagiarism when you write code that uses a library after reading documentation, I guess.
> since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.
Is that how they are able to produce unique code based on libraries that didn't exist in their training set? Or that they themselves wrote? Is that how you can give them the documentation for an API and it writes code that uses it? Your desire to make LLMs "not special" has made you completely blind to reality. Come back to us.
No, you need to prove that it is not plagiarism when you use an LLM to produce a piece of code that you then claim as yours.
You have the whole burden of proof thing backwards.
Oh wild, I was operating under the assumption that the law requires you to prove that a law was broken, but it turns out you need to prove it wasn't. Thanks!
What?
The LLM is trained on a corpus of text, and when it is given a sequence of tokens, it finds a set of token that, when one of them is appended, make the resulting sequence most like the text in that corpus.
If it is given a sequence of tokens that is unlike anything in its corpus, all bets are off and it produces garbage, just like machine learning models in general: if the input is outside the learned distribution, quality goes downhill fast.
The fact that they've added a Monte Carlo feature to the sequence generation, which makes it sometimes select a token that is slightly less like the most exact match in the corpus does not change this.
LLMs are fuzzy lookup tables for existing text, that hallucinate text for out-of-distribution queries.
This is LLM 101.
If the LLM was only trained using documentation, then there would be no problem. If it would generate a design, look at the documentation, understand the semantics of both, and translate the design to code by using the documentation as a guide.
But that's not how it works. It has open source repositories in its corpus that it then recreates by chaining together examples in this stochastic parrot -method I described above.
K
Programmers are willingly blind to this, at least until it's their code being stolen or they lose their job.
_LLMs are lossily compressed archives of stolen code_.
Trying to achieve AI through compression is nothing new.[0] The key innovation[1] is that the model[2] does not output only the first order input data but also the higher order patterns from the input data.
That is certainly one component of intelligence but we need to recognize that the tech companies didn't build AI, they build a compression algorithm which, combined with the stolen input text, can reproduce the input data and its patterns in an intelligent-looking way.
[0]: http://prize.hutter1.net/
[1]: Oh, god, this phrase is already triggering my generated-by-LLM senses.
[2]: Model of what? Of the stolen text. If 99.9999% of the work to achieve AI wasn't done by people whose work was stolen, they wouldn't be called models.
This is not how LLMs work.
You mean like copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow?
> Someone else did
Who?
I've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail.
Not to mention the moral vagaries of "if you use a library, is the complete articulation of your thing actually 100% your code?"
Is there a difference between loading and using a function from ImageMagick, and a standalone copycat function that mimics a function from ImageMagick?
What if you need it transliterated from one language to another?
Is it really that different than those 1200 page books from the 90's that walk you through implementing a 3D engine from scratch (or whatever the topic might be)? If you make a game on top of that book's engine, is your game truly yours?
If you learn an algorithm in some university class and then just write it again later, is that code yours? What if your code is 1-for-1 a copy of the code you were taught?
It gets very murky very quick!
Obviously I would encourage proper citation, but I also recognize the reality of this stuff -- what if you're fully rewriting something you learned decades ago and don't know who to cite? What if you have some code snippet from a website long forgotten that you saved and used? What if you use a library that also uses a library that you're not aware of because you didn't bother to check, and you either cite the wrapper lib or cite nothing at all?
I don't have some grand theory or wise thoughts about this shit, and I enjoy the anthropological studies trying to ascertain provenance / assign moral authority to remarkable edge cases, but end of the day I also find it exhausting to litigate the use of a tool that exploited the fact that your code got hoovered up by a giant robot because it was public, and might get regurgitated elsewhere.
To me, this is the unfortunate and unfair story of Gregory Coleman [0] -- drummer for The Winstons, who recorded "Amen, Brother" in 1969 (which gave us the most-sampled drum break in the world, spawned multiple genres of music, and changed human history) -- the man never made a dime from it, never even knew, and died completely destitute, despite his monumental contribution to culture. It's hard to reconcile the unjustness of it all, yet not that hard to appreciate the countless positive things that came out of it.
I don't know. I guess at the end of the day, does the end justify the means? Feels pretty subjective!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break
What amazes me is how many programmers have absolutely no concept about copyright at all. This should be taught as a basic component of any programming course.
Copyright itself is a complex subject, when you apply it to code it gets more complex.
[flagged]
Yes, the word for that is software developer.
> Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things
Because the rendered output (pixels, not HTML/CSS) is not fed as data in the training. You will find tons of UI snippets and questions, but they rarely included screenshots. And if they do, the are not scraped.
Interesting thought. I wonder if Anthropic et al could include some sort of render-html-to-screenshot as part of the training routine, such that the rendered output would get included as training data.
Even better, a tool that can tell the rendered bounding box of any set of elements, and what the distances between pairs of elements are, so it can make adjustments if relative positioning doesn't match its expectation. This would be incredible for SVG generation for diagrams, too.
thats basically a VLM, but the problem is that describing the world requires a better understanding of the world. Hence why LeCunn is talking about world models (Its also cutting edge for teaching robots to manipulate and plan manipulations)
Why wouldn't they be?
Why would they be?
Well, I don't know but many LLMs are multimodal and understand pictures and images. You can upload videos to Gemini and they're tokenised and fed into the LLM. If some programming blog post has a screenshot with the result of some UI code, why would that not be scraped and used for training? Is there some reason that wouldn't be possible?
Why is this something a Wayland compositor (a glorified window manager) needs to worry about? Apple figured this out back in the 1990s with ColorSync and they did it once for the Mac OS and any application that wanted colour management could use the ColorSync APIs.
Color management infrastructure is intricate. To grossly simplify: somehow you need to connect together the profile and LUT for each display, upload the LUTs to the display controller, and provide appropriate profile data for each window to their respective processes. During compositing then convert buffers that don't already match the output (unmanaged applications will probably be treated as sRGB, color managed graphics apps will opt out of conversion and do whatever is correct for their purpose).
Yes, but why is the compositor dealing with this? Shouldn't the compositor simply be deciding which windows go where (X, Y, and Z positions) and leave the rendering to another API? Why does every different take on a window manager need to re-do all this work?
Turning the question around, what other part of the system _could_ do this job? And how would the compositor do any part of its job if it doesn't have access to both window contents and displays? I'm not super deep in this area but a straight-forward example of a non-managed app and a color-aware graphics app running on a laptop with an external display seems like it is enough to figure out how things need to go together. This neglects some complicating factors like display pixel density, security, accessibility, multi-GPU, etc, but I think it more or less explains how the Wayland authors arrived at its design and how some of the problems got there.
I'm questioning the idea that people should be writing compositors at all. Why doesn't Wayland itself do the compositing and let everyone else just manage windows?
It's like going to Taco Bell and they make you grind your own corn for your tortillas.
Why? Probably better to ask the Wayland developers that. Maybe you're right. That said, whether everyone uses the same compositor and window management is modular, or not and shared code travels as libraries, I don't think the complexity of color management is much different.
I mean, when I hear the word "compositing" I definitely imagine something that involves "alpha" blending, and doing that nicely (instead of a literal alpha calculation) is going to involve colour management.
That's on the Wayland team though. They drew up the new API boundaries and decided that all window managers would now be in the business of compositing.
If I wanted to put it most uncharitably, I'd say they decided to push all of the hard parts out of Wayland itself and force everyone else to deal with them.
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.
> 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."
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.
Side note: As a person who started using a mac since march, I found phoenix slides really good.
It is! I was really just curious if I could update this old codebase without getting my hands dirty.
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.
> The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element...
Absolute positioning wasn't available until CSS2 in 1998. This is just a table with crafty use of align, valign, colspan, and rowspan.
Thanks, my friend. I added a strike through of the error, a correction, and credited you.
I'm keeping it in for now because have made some good jokes about the mistake in the comments and I want to keep that context.
I thought for sure I was going to see an image map when I looked at the source. Pleasant surprise!
Which would also render differently on every machine, based on browser settings, screen sizes, and available fonts.
Like the web was meant to be. An interpreted hypertext format, not a pixel-perfect brochure for marketing execs.
Hum, table cells provide the max-width and images a min-with, heights are absolute (with table cells spilling over, as with CCS "overflow-y: visible"), aligns and maybe HSPACE and VSPACE attributes do the rest. As long as images heights exceed the effective line-height and there's no visible text, this should render pixel perfect on any browser then in use. In this case, there's also an absolute width set for the entire table, adding further constraints. Table layouts can be elastic, with constraints or without, but this one should be pretty stable.
(Fun fact, the most amazing layout foot-guns, then: Effective font sizes and line-heights are subject to platform and configuration (e.g., Win vs Mac); Netscape does paragraph spacing at 1.2em, IE at 1em (if this matters, prefer `<br>` over paragraphs); frames dimensions in Netscape are always calculated as integer percentages of window dimensions, even if you provide absolute dimensions in pixels, while IE does what it says on the tin (a rare example), so they will be the same only by chance and effective rounding errors. And, of course, screen gamma is different on Win and Mac, so your colors will always be messed up – aim for a happy medium.)
Oh good times, the screen gamma issue got me many times back then, as I was the super odd kid on a Mac in the late 90's (father was in education). I'd pull my beautify crafted table-soup site up on a friends PC later and wonder why all the colors were all wacky!
>Like the web was meant to be.
what?
Presumably written by a person who wasn't a web developer back then or were developing solely for Internet Explorer.
Do you not remember the good old days when people who focussed on graphics design rather than content put 'Best used with Netscape/IE5.5' on their pages?
This has been my experience with almost everything I've tried to create with generative AI, from apps and websites, to photos and videos, to text and even simple sentences. At first glance, it looks impressive, but as soon as you look closer, you start to notice that everything is actually just sloppy copy.
That being said, sloppy copy can make doing actual work a lot faster if you treat it with the right about of skepticism and hand-holding.
It's first attempt at the Space Jam site was close enough that it probably could have been manually fixed by an experienced developer in less time than in takes to write the next prompt.
but my experience has also been that with every model they require less hand holding and the code is less sloppy. If I’m careful with my prompts, gpt codex 5.1 recently has been making a lot of typescript for me that is basically production ready in a way it couldn’t even 2 months ago
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."
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.
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.
It would not be the first time that an IT services provider makes more money the worse their products perform.
Hm, I didn't try exactly this, but I probably should!
Wrt unit test script, let's take Claude out of the equation, how would you design the unit test? I kept running into either Claude or some library not being capable of consistently identifying planet vs non planet which was hindering Claude's ability to make decisions based on fine detail or "pixel coordinates" if that makes sense.
If I were to do this (and I might give it a try, this is quite an interesting case), I would try to run a detection model on the image, to find bounding boxes for the planets and their associated text. Even a small model running on CPU should be able to do this relatively quickly.
Do you give Claude the screenshot as a file? If so I’d just ask it to write a tool to diff each asset to every possible location in the source image to find the most likely position of each asset. You don’t really need recognition if you can brute force the search. As a human this is roughly what I would do if you told me I needed to recreate something like that with pixel perfect precision.
Ok! will give it a shot. In a few iterations I gave him screenshots, i have given him the ability to take screenshots, and I gave him the Playwright MCP. I kind of gave up on the path you're suggesting (though I didn't get super far along) because I felt like I would run into this problem eventually of needing a model to figure out what a planet is, where the edge of the planet is, etc.
But if that could be done deterministically, I totally agree this is the way to go. I'll put some more time into it over the next couple weeks.
Congratulations, we finally created 'plain English' programming languages. It only took 1/10th of the worlds electricity and 40% of the semiconductor production.
Yes, this is a key step when working with an agent—if they're able to check their work, they can iterate pretty quickly. If you're in the loop, something is wrong.
That said, I love this project. haha
I'm trying to understand why this comment got downvoted. My best guess is that "if you're in the loop, something is wrong" is interpreted as there should be no human involvement at all.
The loop here, imo, refers to the feedback loop. And it's true that ideally there should be no human involvement there. A tight feedback loop is as important for llms as it is for humans. The more automated you make it, the better.
Yes, maybe I goofed on the phrasing. If you're in the feedback loop, something is wrong. Obviously a human should be "in the loop" in the sense that they're aware of and reviewing what the agent is doing.
>I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot.
There are other ways such as downloading an archive and the preserving the file in one or more cloud storages.
https://archive.is/download/cXI46.zip
The sentence immediately after that would imply sarcasm
> Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree. Please please please help (sad emoji)
There was a response to this post on the front page earlier this morning that was able to get Claude to succeed simply by giving it access to Playwright so it could see what it was doing and telling it in the prompt that it needed to be pixel perfect:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193412
As of right now, it seems to have been flagged into oblivion by the anti-AI crowd. I found both posts to be interesting, and it's unfortunate that one of them is missing from the conversation.
yeah that sucks. I also linked it to the top of my post so folks can take a look.
Context is king. The problem is that you are the one currently telling Claude how close it is and what to do next. But if you give it the tools to do that itself, it will make a world of difference.
Give Claude a way to iteratively poke at what it created (such as a playwright harness), and screenshot of what you want, and maybe a way to take a screenshot in Playwright and I think you will get much closer. You might even be able to one shot it.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if I gave it a screenshot and told it to iterate until the Playwright screenshot matched the mock screenshot, pixel perfect. I imagine it would go nuts, but after a few hours I think it would likely get it. (Either that or minor font discrepancies and rounding errors would cause it to give up…)
The key is always feedback loop. If you give the AI the ability to verify itself, then it's able to iterate faster. Sure, it may take many iterations, but at least the iteration spans will be shorter than waiting for a human to validate each time.
I'd be curious to see how Antigravity compares for the same task with its automatic browser agentic validation logic.
Claude is not very good at using screenshots. The model may technically be multi-modal, but its strength is clearly in reading text. I'm not surprised it failed here.
Especially since it decomposes the image into a semantic vector space rather than the actual grid of pixels. Once the image is transformed into patch embeddings all sense of pixels is entirely destroyed. The author demonstrates a profound lack of understanding for how multimodal LLMs function that a simple query of one would elucidate immediately.
The right way to handle this is not to build it grids and whatnot, which all get blown away by the embedding encoding but to instruct it to build image processing tools of its own and to mandate their use in constructing the coordinates required and computing the eccentricity of the pattern etc in code and language space. Doing it this way you can even get it to write assertive tests comparing the original layout to the final among various image processing metrics. This would assuredly work better, take far less time, be more stable on iteration, and fits neatly into how a multimodal agentic programming tool actually functions.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. LLMs don't have precise geometrical reasoning from images. Having an intuition of how the models work is actually.a defining skill in "prompt engineering"
Yeah, still trying to build my intuition. Experiments/investigations like this help me. Any other blogs or experiments you'd suggest?
Asking your favorite LLM actually helps a lot. They generally are well trained on LLM papers unsurprisingly. In this case though it’s important to realize the LLM is incapable of seeing or hearing or reading. Everything has to be transformed into a vector space. Images are generally cut into patches (like 16x16) which are themselves transformed by several neural networks to convert them into a semantic space represented by the models parameters.
But this isn’t hugely different than your vision. You don’t see the pixel grid either. You have to use tools to measure things. You have the ability over time to iteratively interact with the image by perhaps counting grid lines but the LLM does not - it’s a one shot inference against this highly transformed image. They’ve gotten better at complex visual tasks including types of counting, but it’s not able to examine the image in any analytical way or even in its original representation. It’s just not possible.
It can however make tools that can. It’s very good at working with PIL and other image processing libraries or even writing image processing code de novo, and then using those to ground itself. Likewise it can not do math, but it can write a calculator that can do highly complex mathematics on its behalf.
Great, thanks for that suggestion!
Even with text, parsing content in 2D seems to be a challenge for every LLM I have interacted with. Try getting a chatbot to make an ascii-art circle with a specific radius and you'll see what I mean.
I don't really consider ASCII art to be text. It requires a completely different type of reasoning. A blind person can be understand text if it's read out loud. A blind person really can't understand ASCII art if it's read out loud.
Space Jam website design as an LLM benchmark.
This article is a bit negative. Claude gets close , it just can't get the order right which is something OP can manually fix.
I prefer GitHub Copilot because it's cheaper and integrates with GitHub directly. I'll have times where it'll get it right, and times when I have to try 3 or 4 times.
>which is something OP can manually fix
what if the LLM gets something wrong that the operator (a junior dev perhaps) doesn't even know it's wrong? that's the main issue: if it fails here, it will fail with other things, in not such obvious ways.
>what if the LLM gets something wrong that the operator (a junior dev perhaps) doesn't even know it's wrong?
the same thing that always happens if a dev gets something wrong without even knowing it's wrong - either code review/QA catches it, or the user does, and a ticket is created
>if it fails here, it will fail with other things, in not such obvious ways.
is infallibility a realistic expectation of a software tool or its operator?
By sheer chance, there's now a HN submission that answers both (but mostly the second) questions PERFECTLY:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46185957
I think that's the main problem with them. It is hard to figure out when they're wrong.
As the post shows, you can't trust them when they think they solved something but you also can't trust them when they think they haven't[0]. The things are optimized for human preference, which ultimately results in this being optimized to hide mistakes. After all, we can't penalize mistakes in training when we don't know the mistakes are mistakes. The de facto bias is that we prefer mistakes that we don't know are mistakes than mistakes that we do[1].
Personally I think a well designed tool makes errors obvious. As a tool user that's what I want and makes tool use effective. But LLMs flip this on the head, making errors difficult to detect. Which is incredibly problematic.
[0] I frequently see this in a thing it thinks is a problem but actually isn't, which makes steering more difficult.
[1] Yes, conceptually unknown unknowns are worse. But you can't measure unknown unknowns, they are indistinguishable from knowns. So you always optimize deception (along with other things) when you don't have clear objective truths (most situations).
That's not the point of the article. It's about Claude/LLM being overconfident in recreating pixel perfect.
All AI's are overconfident. It's impressive what they can do, but it is at the same time extremely unimpressive what they can't do while passing it off as the best thing since sliced bread. 'Perfect! Now I see the problem.'. 'Thank you for correcting that, here is a perfect recreation of problem 'x' that will work with your hardware.' (never mind the 10 glaring mistakes).
I've tried these tools a number of times and spent a good bit of effort on learning to maximize the return. By the time you know what prompt to write you've solved the problem yourself.
> it just can't get the order right which is something OP can manually fix.
If the tool needs you to check up on it and fix its work, it's a bad tool.
“Bad” seems extreme. The only way to pass the litmus test you’ve described is for a tool to be 100% perfect, so then the graph looks like 99.99% “bad tool” until it reaches 100% perfection.
It’s not that binary imo. It can still be extremely useful and save a ton of time if it does 90% of the work and you fix the last 10%. Hardly a bad tool.
It’s only a bad tool if you spent more time fixing the results than building it yourself, which sometimes used to be the case for LLMs but is happening less and less as they get more capable.
If you show me a tool that does a thing perfectly 99% of the time, I will stop checking it eventually. Now let me ask you: How do you feel about the people who manage the security for your bank using that tool? And eventually overlooking a security exploit?
I agree that there are domains for which 90% good is very, very useful. But 99% isn't always better. In some limited domains, it's actually worse.
Counterpoint.
Humans don't get it right 100% or the time.
That is a true and useful component of analyzing risk, but the point is that human behaviour isn't a simple risk calculation. We tend to over-guard against things that subjectively seem dangerous, and under-guard against things that subjectively feel safe.
This isn't about whether AI is statistically safer, it's actually about the user experience of AI: If we can provide the same guidance without lulling a human backup into complacency, we will have an excellent augmented capability.
I wouldn't go that far, but I do believe good tool design tries to make its failure modes obvious. I like to think of it similar to encryption: hard to do, easy to verify.
All tools have failure modes and truthfully you always have to check the tool's work (which is your work). But being a master craftsman is knowing all the nuances behind your tools, where they work, and more importantly where they don't work.
That said, I think that also highlights the issue with LLMs and most AI. Their failure modes are inconsistent and difficult to verify. Even with agents and unit tests you still have to verify and it isn't easy. Most software bugs are created from subtle things, often which compound. Which both those things are the greatest weaknesses of LLMs: nuance and compounding effects.
So I still think they aren't great tools, but I do think they can be useful. But that also doesn't mean it isn't common for people to use them well outside the bounds of where they are generally useful. It'll be fine a lot of times, but the problem is that it is like an alcohol fire[0]; you don't know what's on fire because it is invisible. Which, after all, isn't that the hardest part of programming? Figuring out where the fire is?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpLOn-KJSE
That's my thinking. If I need to check up on the work, then I'm equally capable of writing the code myself. It might go faster with an LLM assisting me, and that feels perfectly fine. My issue is when people use the AI tools to generate something far beyond their own capabilities. In those cases, who checks the result?
Perfection is the enemy of good.
ya, this is true. Another commenter also pointed out that my intention was to one-shot. I didn't really go too deeply into trying to try multiple iterations.
This is also fairly contrived, you know? It's not a realistic limitation to rebuild HTML from a screenshot because of course if I have the website loaded I can just download the HTML.
> rebuild HTML from a screenshot
???
This is precisely the workflow when a traditional graphic designer mocks up a web/app design, which still happens all the time.
They sketch a design in something like Photoshop or Illustrator, because they're fluent in these tools and many have been using them for decades, and somebody else is tasked with figuring out how to slice and encode that design in the target interactive tech (HTML+CSS, SwiftUI, QT, etc).
Large companies, design agencies, and consultancies with tech-first design teams have a different workflow, because they intentionally staff graphic designers with a tighter specialization/preparedness, but that's a much smaller share of the web and software development space than you may think.
There's nothing contrived at all about this test and it's a really great demonstration of how tools like Claude don't take naturally to this important task yet.
You know, you're totally right and I didn't even think about that.
It’s not unrealistic to want to revert to an early version of something you only have a screenshot of.
(1) Multi-modal is where a lot of these things go to die. You will hear people talk about the occasional striking success but so often I show Copilot an easily identifiable flower image and it gets it wrong even though Google Lens will get it right
(2) The kind of dialog he's having with Claude is a kind of communication pattern I've found never works with LLMs. Sure there is the kind of conversation that goes
but if it is and it comes back with something entirely wrong I'd assume the state of the thing is corrupted and it is never coming back and no matter how you interrogate it, encourage it, advise it, threaten it, whatever, you will go in circles.I got quite close with Gemini 3 pro in AI studio. I uploaded a screenshot (no assets) and the results were similar to OP. It failed to follow my fix initially but I told it to follow my directions (lol) and it came quite close (though portrait mode distorted it, landscape was close to perfect.
“Reference the original uploaded image. Between each image in the clock face, create lines to each other image. Measure each line. Now follow that same process on the app we’ve created, and adjust the locations of each image until all measurements align exactly.”
https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
Couldn’t you just feed Claude all the raw, inspect element HTML from the website and have it “decrypt” that?
The entire website is fairly small so this seems feasible.
Usually there’s a big difference between a website’s final code and its source code because of post processing but that seems like a totally solvable Claude problem.
Sure LLMs aren’t great with images, but it’s not like the person who originally wrote the Space Jam website was meticulously messing around with positioning from a reference image to create a circular orbit — they just used the tools they had to create an acceptable result. Claude can do the same.
Perhaps the best method is to re-create, rather than replicate the design.
What do you mean? Raw html is the original website source code.
Modern web development completely poisoned young generation
I'm using source code like it's used when referring to source code vs executables. React doesn't simply spit out HTML, nor the JSX used to write said React code, it outputs a mixture of things that's the optimized HTML/CSS/JS version of the React you wrote. This is akin to source code and the optimized binaries we actually use.
Perhaps the wrong usage of "source code". I probably should've been more precise. Forgive my lack of vocabulary to describe the difference I was referring to.
For a website from 1996 though, there’s a very good chance that the page source is the source code
There were no binaries or packages. You wrote the HTML in notepad or maybe you used some "high speed IDE" with syntax highlighting and some buttons like Dreamweaver and then uploaded it via FTP to whatever server you were hosting it on. No muss, no fuss. It was a glorious time and I miss that internet a lot.
Nor are there binaries now. I was simply making an analogy between traditional binaries/source code, and the way the web is built today (frameworks).
If you have the raw HTML why would you need to do this at all?
I should've been more precise with my words.
What I meant is doing inspect element on the Space Jam website, and doing select all + copy.
I think you're assuming a pattern existed in 1996 that didn't actually exist until the 2010s.
In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files.
Even a decade later, React and the frontend-framework sort of thinking wasn't really a big thing. People had started to make lots of things with "DHTML" in the early 2000s where JavaScript was used to make things spicier (pretty animations, some server side loading with AJAX) and still often worked without JS enabled in a pattern called graceful degradation.
What you'd get from "View Source", or "Inspect Element", and what was literally saved on disk of spacejam.com, was almost certainly the same content.
I'm not trying to dispute this though. Although I appreciate the clarity, I am aware of the web's past.
The only point I was trying to make was that this project could be better achieved by an LLM if spacejam.com's HTML is supplied.
For why you'd want to do this rather than simply use the original code is up to the developer, but I'd expect a common reason to be the ease of modern frameworks. Some justifications for making Claude create the same code again in a different framework include:
- Using <script> tags is bad practice in a lot of modern frameworks, and it's better to just translate to React and run your logic directly within components.
- Perhaps you're using TailwindCSS, in which case it's a good idea to port over all the original CSS so you can have unified codebase.
- Hosting on modern frameworks is often conveinent.
- Sometimes (although maybe not for a website this small) the source code with a framework is less verbose.
You probably misunderstood me because I paraphrased "raw" HTML several times throughout my comments in this thread before I actually read the page source and realized it was the original source code.
I think that the reason why everyone is acting surprised about your suggestion is that the target wasn’t to obtain the page in some higher level framework or anything. The HTML of the page was what the author wanted Claude to output. Would he used source HTML as an input, there would be nothing for Claude to do. Different exercise.
https://pastebin.com/raw/F2jxZTeJ
The HTML I'm referring to, copied from the website.
Only about 7,000 characters or just 2,000 Claude tokens. This is feasible.
There's actually a language model developed by The Open Group that will transform that back into the original source code.
<https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/c...>
Amazing what technology can do these days.
Got a chuckle out of me. lol
The space jam website used HTML tables for formatting and split images in each cell.
CSS didn't exist.
I wouldn't call it entirely defeated, it got maybe 90% of the way there. Before LLMs you couldn't get 50% of the way there in an automated way.
> What he produces
I feel like personifying LLMs more than they currently are is a mistake people make (though humans always do this), they're not entities, they don't know anything. If you treat them too human you might eventually fool yourself a little too much.
As a couple other comments pointed out, it's also not fair to judge Claude based on a one shot like this. I sort of assume these limitations will remain even if we went back and forth but to be fair, I didn't try that more than a few times in this investigation. Maybe on try three it totally nails it.
Very true, I would also caution this with test projects with real humans in the hiring process. Comparing one-shots from actual people is unfair too, and often the most valid assessment comes with giving them feedback and seeing how they respond to it.
Aside from that point: if you are reading this and making people do a project as part of the hiring process, you should absolutely be paying them for their time (even a token amount).
I checked the source of the original (like maybe many of you) to check how they actually did it and it was... simpler than expected. I drilled myself so hard to forget tables as layout... And here it is. So simple it's a marvel.
And they do hacky things like space elements vertically using <br> tags.
I almost did it with the plain claude code on a $20 plan, without any skills, by leveraging my domain expertise with the following prompt:
Note: the footer text size/locations are off. We can probably fix that by explicitly asking cc to write scripts for text bounding box detection.More details here: https://gist.github.com/jia-kai/802de63816711d67f0a090fa267a...
Just use Playwright Skill (https://github.com/lackeyjb/playwright-skill). It is a game changer. Otherwise it is Claude the Blind, as OP mentioned.
But that's cheating because it then has the source code containing the table and its styles.
I can confirm that this is what it does.
And if you ask it to not use tables, it cleverly uses div with the same layout as the table instead.
I think the idea is to let Claude see iterations of the reproduction with playwright, but still only allow access to screenshots of the original.
Everything feels wrong with that approach too me, starting with calling a perfectly time-appropriate website anachronistic.
Anachronistic would be something like creating an apparent flash website for a fictional 90s internet related movie.
He's using it correctly, in its secondary sense of "belonging or appropriate to an earlier period, especially so as to seem conspicuously old-fashioned or outdated."
Still not quite convinced that the adjective should be applied to the website itself in a quite loose use of the word.
Warner Bros anachronistically keeps this website online would be a simple fix; here used to reference and to point out that maintaining an untouched 1996 promotional site at it's original location is not typical for the lifecycle of a website, usually the publisher would rather redirect clicks to some current offer.
Othwerwise there is no anachronism here with the website itself, just it's location under the original URL and not in some archive only.
The website itself fulfilled its purpose for promoting the movie when it was released and simply continues to exist.
You wouldn’t call posters, magazines, or other artifacts from the ’90s anachronistic just for still existing. Being retrievable doesn’t make something outdated by itself.
“Anachronistic” would apply only if a new promotional site were created today to look like this—though that would more likely be called “retro.”
Or if the movie industry insisted on using CSS-free table layouts for all its promotional websites, similar to other norms or laws that feel anachronistic because they no longer match current needs.
Sadly the whole piece reads like it was written 80%+ by an LLM too, seriously why all the emojis? But apparently this is where content is heading in general.
I just feel this is a great example of someone falling into the common trap of treating an LLM like a human.
They are vastly less intelligent than a human and logical leaps that make sense to you make no sense to Claude. It has no concept of aesthetics or of course any vision.
All that said; it got pretty close even with those impediments! (It got worse because the writer tried to force it to act more like a human would)
I think a better approach would be to write a tool to compare screenshots, identity misplaced items and output that as a text finding/failure state. claude will work much better because your dodging the bits that are too interpretive (that humans rock at and LLMs don't)
> vastly less intelligent than a human
I would more phrase it like that they are a completely alien “intelligence” that cant really be compared to human intelligence
I meant that frame very deliberately. Use of the word AI is misleading people that LLMs are intelligent.
They model what looks like intelligence but with very hard limits. The two advantages they have over human brains are perfect recall and data storage. They are also faster.
But the brain is vastly more intelligent:
- It can learn concepts (e.g. language) with an order of magnitude less information
- It responds in parallel to multiple formats of stimuli (e.g. sight/sound)
- LLMs lack the ability to generalise
- The brain interprets and understands what it experienced
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me wrong: I use AI, it is by far some of the most impressive tech we have built so far, and it has potential to advance society significantly.
But it is definitely, vastly, less intelligent than us.
Yes, currently they are both smarter and dumber than humans.
The blog frequently refers to the LLM as "him" instead of "it" which somehow feels disturbing to me.
I love to anthropomorphize things like rocks or plants, but something about doing it to an AI that responds in human like language enters an uncanny valley or otherwise upsets me.
Claude is surprisingly bad at visual understanding. I did a similar thing to OP where I wanted Claude to visually iterate on Storybook components. I found outsourcing the visual check to Playwright in vision mode (as opposed to using the default a11y tree) and Codex for understanding worked best. But overall the idea of a visual inspection loop went nowhere. I blogged about it here: https://solbach.xyz/ai-agent-accessibility-browser-use/
Interesting read. Agree that GUI is super hard for agents. Did you see "skills" from browser-use? We directly interact with network requests now.
The article does not say at any point which model was used. This is the most basic important information when talking about the capabilities of a model, and probably belongs in the title.
Whoops, I'm very dumb. It's Opus 4.1. I updated the blog post and credited you for the correction. Thank you!
That model does not exist. Do you mean Opus 4.5?
> That model does not exist.
It does (unless the previous comment was edited? Currently it says Opus 4.1): https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-1. You can see it in the 'more models' list on the main Claude website, or in Claude Console.
yep, this is what I used.
Opus GPT 4.1 Pro Maverick DeepK2
Interesting - these models are all trained to do pixel-level(ish) measurement now, for bounding boxes and such. I wonder if you could railroad it into being accurate with the right prompt.
What models are good at this? I have tried passing images to models and asking them for coordinates for specific features, then overlaid dots on those points and passed that image back to the model so it has a perception of how far out it was. It had a tendency to be consistently off by a fixed amount without getting closer.
I don't doubt that it is possible eventually, but I haven't had much luck.
Something that seemed to assist was drawing a multi coloured transparent chequerboard, if the AI knows the position of the grid colours it can pick out some relative information from the grid.
I've found Qwen3-VL to be fairly accurate at detection (though it doesn't always catch every instance). Note that it gives answers as per-mille-ages, as if the image was 1000x1000 regardless of actual resolution or aspect ratio.
I have also not had luck with any kind of iterative/guess-and-check approach. I assume the models are all trained to one-shot this kind of thing and struggle to generalize to what are effectively relative measurements.
I can't do that either without opening up an image editing tool. Give the model a tool and goal with "vision". Should work better.
Feels like the "right" approach would be to have it write some code to measure how far off the elements are in the original vs recreated image, and then iterate using the numerical output of the program...
My web-dev friend saw the original Space Jam site. I asked him what it would cost to build something like that today. He paused and said:
We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.
Not sure how good Claude is nowadays, but I remember using Claude 3.5 to do some fiction writing and for a while I thought it was amazing at coming up with plots, setting ideas, writing witty dialogue - then after a short while I noticed it kept recycling the same ideas, phrases etc, quickly becoming derivative, and having 'tells', similar to the group of 3 quirk, with some otherwise decent writing patterns showing up with great frequency.
I've heard the same thing about it doing frontends - it produces gorgeous websites but it has similar 'tells', it does CSS and certain features the same way, and if you have a very concrete idea of what you want out of it, you'll end up fighting an uphill battle with it constantly trying to do things its own way.
Which is part of the 'LLM illusion' - I guess. To an unskilled individual, or when starting from scratch, it seems great, but the more complex the project gets, the harder it becomes to have it contribute meaningfully, leading to an ever-mounting frustration, and eventually me just giving up and doing it by hand.
My boy loves a neon gradient.
To be fair, a lot of startup websites look very similar. And the number of Stripe blurples out there was a pre-LLM brand meme.
It seems to me that Claude's error here (which is not unique to it) is self-sycophancy. The model is too eager to convince itself it did a good job.
I'd be curious to hear from experienced agent users if there is some AGENTS.md stuff to make the LLM more clear speaking? I wonder if that would impact the quality of work.
> It seems to me that Claude's error here (which is not unique to it) is self-sycophancy. The model is too eager to convince itself it did a good job.
It seems this applies to the whole AI industry, not just LLMs.
Claude argued with me about the quadratic equation the other day. It vehemently felt a -c was required whereas a c was the correct answer. I pointed this out showing step by step and it finally agreed. I tried Grok to see if it could get it right. Nope, the exact same response as Claude, but Grok never backed down; even after the step by step explanation of the maths.
Can you link to the conversation log?
In the generalised solution there is a '-c' term with coefficient '4a'...?
I'm not well at the moment, perhaps your ML model has flu?!!
Claude can't properly count the number of characters in a sentence. It's asking a lot to assume it can get pixel perfect.
LLMs can, for example, write a script to calculate all permutations of the levenshtein distances between words in a sentence and deliver it before the average programmer even understands what this means. Trivialy.
You're just holding it wrong if you're asking it to simply count the characters in a sentence.
I like how the author calls a script on the internet "him".
[dead]
lol
better than using a plural for a single entity
To each their own.
Come on, just stop. "They" have been used to refer to singular antecedents since the 14th century. (Source: https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-the...)
“it”
I am going to give this a shot, but using a method I have been using lately with subagents. Basically, what I do is have it create an Architect, Executor, Adjudicator subagents. Architect breaks any ask down into atomic and testable subtasks that take 1-3 minutes 'dev' time. Executor (can spawn more than one) implements them. Then adjudicator reviews that they are to spec / requirements. This all happens in subagent files + a runbook.json in the .claude folder of a project. Its based on a paper* that was featured on here a while back actually [1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09030
THanks for sharing this. Partly because i forgot about this great website :D also because i would never thought of giving this as an LLM task because its so simple that i prolly just had hacked it down myself :D
I recently experimented alot with agentic coding (mostly with gemini+ intellij plugin, copilot intellij plugin and intellij's own junie) and also condsidered to give it a try and feed images to the AI, but than all tasks i tried so far were pure backend-ish so it never came to the point.
Im really curious how especially junie will act and i will give it a try with the very same task you gave it. We gonne see how it ends :D
LLM stands for large LANGUAGE models, so I guess you could succeed if you had a correct LANGUAGE. Maybe radial coordinates? Or turtle graphics? I myself tried to generate an SVG with twelve radial dots as in a clock in chatgpt, and failed (a year ago). Now I think it would succeed, however still the question is does it succeed because people trained it to do so.
Also I have noticed that AI generates things close to what you want, and it sticks really hard to that "close" qualifier, not wanting to cross any borders to get too close, so I'd be happy with the effect you have shown, as it is what AI does
You might enjoy these AI generated clocks: https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
AI-assisted coding is a learned skill. You'll have to do it right, with the right approach and the right tools.
>Look, I still need this Space Jam website recreated.
Now that's a novel sentence if I've ever read one.
Lovable was able to one-shot it (except for the top margin): https://spacejam-pixel-perfect.lovable.app/
All I did was give Lovable a single prompt: "with pixel perfect accuracy recreate this website: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/"
Edit: Commenter below may be right.
It just fetched the HTML and replicated it. The usage of table is a giveaway.
Any LLM with browser tool can do it (Kombai one shots it too for example), because it's just cheating.
haha wow - it also just straight up copied the .gif files byte for byte - same SHA sum
I keep wondering ... is this a good benchmark? What is a practical use-case for the skills Claude is supposed to present here? And if the author needs that particular website re-created with pixel-perfect accuracy, woulnd't it me simpler to just to it yourself?
Sure, you can argue this is some sort of modern ACID-Test - but the ACID tests checked for real-world use-cases. This feels more like 'I have this one very specific request, the machine doesn't perfectly fullfill it, so the machine is at fault.'. Complaining from a high pedestal.
I'm more surprised at how close Claude got in its reimagined SpaceJam-site.
I would put Claude into a loop and let it make screenshots itself, diffing them against the original screenshot, until it has found the right arrangement at the planets‘ starting position (pixel perfect match).
I would try giving it a tool to work with projections and process axis by axis to see if it works better in 1D than 2D. I dunno how clever claude is about signal processing though. There's no noise here so... I mean really it's just template matching without rotation and without noise so... But I doubt claude can do or reason about basic image processing.
At that point you may as well just do the work yourself.
What I‘m describing is probably a few minutes of exploring and writing a good prompt, vs what, 4h of CSS wrangling?
I don’t see how this should take more than a few minutes of css work.
Why? Just give it access to the playwright mcp server.
I‘m using this, works really well and doesn’t pollute context as much:
https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts/blob/main/scripts/...
The real kicker is that LLMs were trained on modern web dev content where "tables for layout" is a cardinal sin. So you're asking it to do something its training data actively told it NOT to do for years.
Email HTML development is the last bastion of table-based layouts and it's wild that it's still necessary in 2024. Every time I touch email templates I feel like I'm time traveling.
Building something similar - using Claude API to generate mini games from text descriptions (https://codorex.com, still pretty rough).
Can confirm: Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts, but spatial precision is a constant battle. Anything involving exact pixel positions needs validation/correction layers on top.
The suggestion upthread about having it write its own measurement tools seems promising - haven't tried that approach yet.
Actually, here's a relevant example - had Claude generate an interactive solar system with circular orbits and moons: https://codorex.com/shared/yeABdJWvRHAKqHs2kxpRnZNZPWmqWSu9
Interesting that it handles this fine (functional orbital mechanics, animation) but would probably struggle to recreate the exact pixel positions of the Space Jam layout. Confirms the pattern: good at "make something like X" but bad at "recreate X exactly."
This is really cool.
I wrote a 20,000 line multiplayer battle-arena game in XNA back in 2015 with manually coded physics (so everything is there in the code) and have tried several times with Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and GPT to translate it to JavaScript.
They all fail massively 100% of the time. Even if I break it down into chunks once they get to the chunks that matter the most (i.e. physics, collision detection and resolution, event handling and game logic) they all break down horribly and no amount of prompting back and forth will fix it.
I personally don't understand why asking these things to do things we know they can't do is supposed to be productive. Maybe for getting around restrictions or fuzzing... I don't see it as an effective benchmark unless it can link directly to the ways the models are being improved, but, to look at random results that sometimes are valid and think more iterations of randomness will eventually give way to control is a maddening perspective to me, but perhaps I need better language to describe this.
I think this is a reasonable take. I think for me, I like to investigate limitations like this in order to understand where the boundaries are. Claude isn't impossibly bad at analyzing images. It's just pixel perfect corrections that seem to be a limitation. Maybe for some folks it's enough to just read that but for me, I like to feel like I have some good experiential knowledge about the limitations that I can keep in my brain and apply appropriately in the future.
Yes but follow this forward, what about current models would be informative about future models. We've seen waves of "insight" come and go, to the point where there are endless waves of people at different points in the journey, there's a cohort of people that would be upset at the statement that prompt engineering is useless, and others that would support that as exactly right, and still more that would have a redefinition of the word prompt to include many other things. This is my exact complaint. You would want it work like how you want it to work, that our collective discoveries will turn into education and learning, but the content in the models and the subsequent inference based on that information have all not behaved like the physical sciences with regards to discoveries providing universal and reliable knowledge.
I think claude could have easily used a script to calculate the positions of the planets exactly here, instead of trying to use the frankly horrible image recognition.
Claude could probably have written a script to do it. I'm hunting assets to confirm.
Edit: yup very easy for claude. Most of the wall time was spent installing cv2 in a venv (uv dropped python 3.14 on claude, which seemed to get stuck compiling numpy or something so I interrupted and told claude to just use python 3.13 instead).
ME: In this directory there are two images: @p-pressbox.gif and @screenshot.png. @p-pressbox.gif is an image that exists somewhere inside @screenshot.png Write a script that finds the precise location
CLAUDE: Looking at the images, I can see that p-pressbox.gif (the spaceship with "PRESS BOX SHUTTLE" text) appears in the upper-left area of screenshot.png. I'll write a Python script using OpenCV to find the precise location.
[ some venv stuff/telling claude to use uv and python 3.13 ]
CLAUDE: The script found the precise location of p-pressbox.gif within screenshot.png:
ME> As part of the output create a visualization of the @p-pressbox.gif positioned on top of the original screenshotCLAUDE: Done! The visualization shows a green rectangle highlighting the exact location where p-pressbox.gif was found within the screenshot. The match is at coordinates (87, 110) to (218, 166).
I confirmed the result was correct.
Oh what the heck. That worked really well for you. Would you be willing to recreate all the html and push it up to github? I'll drop the repo at the top of the blog post. It would be really cool for me to see this completely done and a great way to finish out the blog post. I obviously couldn't do it.
I got pretty far with this initial prompt:
I just let Claude (Opus 4.5) do anything it wanted to do as it went.At this point all the image assets are pixel perfect but the footer is in the wrong place and I had to hold Claude's hand a bit to get the footer into the approximately correct spot:
At this point Claude was having trouble because its hadn't got a clean view of the target text location in the original screenshot (it was creating scripts that look at the red channel in the bottom half of the image to pull out the text but that was also grabbing part of the site map logo. Interestingly it made a comment about this but didn't do anything about it). So I gave it this additional hint: This got the footer in the correct location but the fonts/font sizes etc are not correct yet.> Interestingly it made a comment about this but didn't do anything about it
Classic.
This is awesome. Great work. Please follow up again if you happen to nail it.
It's now got everything close after adding this final prompt:
This took quite a while and it build a few more tools to get there. And this was fine from a distance but it was using a san-serif when the screenshot has a serif etc. So I decided to push. From here it got very messy...One of the issues is that Claude's text detection was getting tripped up by writing scripts using RGB space instead of something more hue-aware. It knew the text was red but was trying to isolate it by just looking at the red channel. But the grey dots from the background show up bright in the red channel so Claude would think those were center dots between the links that needed to be reproduced in the text. I gave it a hint:
Claude decided to switch to HSV space. But it took quite a bit of effort to keep Claude remembering to use HSV because tools it had already written were still RGB and not updated (as were intermediate images that were not updated). Then it would try to step back and get a big picture as a sanity check and "discover" it had missed the dots that are obviously there. And when you would tell it there are no dots, you get the "You're absolutely right! They're vertical bars!" So it was a struggle. This is the closest I got:https://imgur.com/a/79Iv1jO
Again, the top image stuff was done in the first shot with the prompt in the first one. Everything else has been about the footer. Claude has been writing a lot of clever scripts to measure font metrics and pick fonts etc, but it keeps falling over those dots. I could probably get it to work better with adding directives for text handling to CLAUDE.md and nuking context and some of the scripts it created.
ha this is awesome. I'm going to link this comment in the post. Great work. lmk if you end up pushing it up to github.
This was very interesting. I've tried to create an "agent" Claude Code based system to generate design from screenshots, using Playwright and other tools to take screenshots for iterative improvements. So far I have failed despite weeks of struggles.
Thanks to this post I now have a deeper understanding as to why. Thank you.
This is spot on to my experience vibe coding. You can get pretty good scaffolding but tinkering with details is a nightmare. That is when you need to step in and take over yourself or you will burn all the time saved from the the scaffolding speed up.
I'm actually surprised Claude was about to do that much.
I hadn't even considered handing it a visual mockup to work from. Event though that workflow is par for the course for any web design team.
I would assume there must be at least some prior work into locating individual assets in a larger canvas. It just needs to be integrated into the pipeline.
I wonder if Gemini 3 Pro would do better at this particular test? They're very proud of its spatial awareness and vision abilities.
>They're very proud of its spatial awareness and vision abilities.
Suuuuuuuuure they are.
I haven't found a single multimodal model, vision LLM, or any model at all that can segment and extract music charts/infographics.
Can Gemini 3 Pro, in one shot, turn charts like these into lists of "artist - album" without choking on the visuals?
https://reddit.com/r/citypop/comments/10fu1t5/city_pop_album...
https://reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/173o33z/the_new_ind...
Might work if you set media resolution to high: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/media-resolution
I tried it on one of the images, how did it do? https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%257B%2522ids%...
I don't trust the AI Studio "share" links so here's the image I used: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
And the prompt:
I ran that against Gemini 3 Pro Preview with media resolution set to "high"Here's the result:
I have recently been working on something "fun" in the terminal that mingles plain ASCII, ANSI "graphics", actual bitmaps (Sixel), and Nerdfonts in a TUI framework (Charm etc). After a week of smashing Claude's head against a wall, which is better than smashing my own, I've had to significantly alter my hopes and expectations.
Look at that stupid dog. It's reading a book, but it's really trashy YA. It's not even Shakespeare. Dogs are stupid.
But the dog's owner keeps saying that it ONLY reads Shakespeare. The dog's owner wants millions of dollars for the dog on that basis.
I'm not mad at the dogs, I'm mad at the stupid investors and the lying owners.
lol, that is fair criticism
Loved the fun write up. Now that we know that LLM-based vision is lossy, here's a different challenge:
Give the LLM access to the site's DOM and let it recreate the site with modern CSS. LLMs are much better with source code, aka text, right? :)
A site in '96 would have been built largely with tables, not CSS. CSS didn't become a thing until a couple of years later.
I know this because I'm still salty about the transition. For all of CSS's advantages, we lost something when we largely moved away from tables.
We lost something for a time but flex box and CSS grid (which came more recently) are objectively better than tables.
How are they objectively better? They seem way too complex for me
You can still use tables.
Of course, as implied by, "we largely moved away from tables."
This is a great under the radar test for AI. I would put money on it failing to recreate the majority of 90s movie websites as it wasn't trained on them. The old cowboy webmasters that built and ultimately abandoned them didn't write many books on the topic.
I look forward to an alternative reality where AI vendors race to have the model with the best Space Jam Bench scores.
It beats pelicans by a considerable margin.
We don't know how to build it anymore
In my experience codex has been better at details like this. But who knows working with an llm much like another engineer is all about how you ask and then how you iterate with the llm.
Sibling post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193412
I'm curious. Did you ask it to use tables and no CSS?
In 1996, We had only css1. Ask it to use tables to do this, perhaps.
We actually had a myriad of competing specs. CSS proper wasn't released until december 1996.
Any names for the competing specs? Maybe i could try re-prompting with that direction.
Models are trained with content scraped from the net, for the most part. The availability of content pertaining to those specs is almost nil, and of no SEO value. Ergo, models for the most part will only have a cursory knowledge of a spec that your browser will never be able to parse because that isn't the spec that won.
Nonetheless, here is a link to a list of the specs you asked for: https://www.w3.org/Style/History/Overview.en.html
Almost nil?
Websites that started before 2000 tend to stick around and comparably quite well archived.
What has model training to do with SEO, that's outright detrimental to it for the most part.
This is the spec it can guarantee you that's in every large language model thats actually large.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866
https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/
Why even bring up CSS this was before that.
You can just also learn with the knowledge of 1996
Selfhtml exits it pretty easy to limit the scope of authoring language to a given HTML version and target browser. Your LLM should have no problem with german.
https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/Museum
some other docs:
https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/publications/WWW-Desig...
Just spec the year and target browser and target standard and you will get something better than just asking for visual accuracy.
The OG prompt is simply poor and loose:
"Your job is to recreate the landing page as faithfully as possible, matching the screenshot exactly."
Thanks for sharing that. I read through a lot of this. Interesting to read those perspectives in the context of today.
Much obliged. Have a good weekend. Your new gray hairs are en route :)
There were specs competing for adoption, but only tables (the old way) and CSS were actually adopted by browsers. So no point trying to use some other positioning technique.
Yes yes great question!
I tried your suggestion and also tried giving it various more general versions of the limitations presented by earlier generations.
Claude's instinct initially was actually to limit itself to less modern web standards.
Unfortunately, nothing got those planets to be in the right place.
Why not ask Claude to recreate the website by scraping it?
Hmm you note that the problem is the LLM doesn’t have enough image context, but then zoom the image more?
Why not downscale the image and feed it as a second input so that entire planets fit into a patch and instruct it to use the doensampled image for coarse coordinate estimation
Maybe we could try asking Claude to generate code using <table>, <tr>, <td> for layout instead of relying on div + CSS. Feels like it could simplify things a lot.
Would this actually work, or am I missing something?
I think it probably gets you 80% but the last 20% of pixel perfection seems to evade Claude. But I'm pretty new to writing prompts so if you can nail it let me know and I'll link you in the post.
We've lost the capability to build such marvels.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-father-in-law-is-a-builder...
Lost it at wooden structures at the playground.
Tell claude to put the screenshot as an centered image with the body having the starry background on repeat. Then define the links as boxes over each icons with an old little tech trick called an image map.
Common at the time before flash took over.
Has anyone found techniques to improve Claude's spatial/layout understanding?
It seems Nano Banana Pro can understand the layout/spatial well.
I was able to get Claude to do this, though it kinda sorta cheated. Blog post describing the output here: https://theahura.substack.com/p/i-successfully-recreated-the...
TLDR:
"The plan is designed to ‘autoformalize’ the problem by using Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is incredibly important for getting good outputs from a coding agent, because it helps solve the context rot problem. Specifically, if you can write a good test when the model is most ‘lucid’, it will have an easier time later on because it is just solving the test instead of ‘building a feature’ or whatever high dimensional ask you originally gave it.
From here, Nori chugged away for the better part of half an hour in yolo mode while I went to do other things. And eventually I got a little pop up notification saying that it was done. It had written a playwright test that would open an html file, screenshot it, diff it with the original screenshot, and output the final result...
After trying a few ways to get the stars to line up perfectly, it just gave up and copied the screenshot in as the background image, then overlaid the rest of the HTML elements on top.
I’m tempted to give this a pass for a few reasons.
This obviously covers the original use case that tripped up Jonah.
It also is basically exactly what I asked the model to do — that is, give me a pixel perfect representation — so it’s kind of my fault that I was not clearer.
I’m not sure the model actually can get to pixel perfect any other way. The screengrab has artifacts. After all, I basically just used the default linux screenshot selection tool to get the original output, without even paying much attention to the width of the image.
If you ask the model to loosen the requirements for the exact screengrab, it does the right thing, but the pixel alignment is slightly off. The model included this as index_tiled.html in the repo, and you can see the pixel diff in one of the output images..."
> here's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot
And
> I'm an engineering manager
I can't tell if this is an intentional or unintentional satire of the current state of AI mandates from management.
Honest question: does he know about F5? Or was it intentional to use screenshots when source is available?
What is F5? Beside refresh in the browser?
You really can’t tell? Perhaps the bar for AGI is lower than I thought.
lololol
i can’t tell if your comment is satire or not
A comparison would Codex would be good. I haven't done it with Codex, but when working through problems using ChatGPT, it does a great job when given screenshots.
Apropos given Warner Brothers Discovery just sold to Netflix
Why not just feed it the actual instructions that create the site - the page source code, the HTML, CSS, JS if any?
This may be an even greater challenge: analysing a table layout and recreating it in CSS with absolute positioning.
Use Claude for Python. That's it. Don't push it for the frontend, it won't do well.
> The total payload is under 200KB.
Just out of curiosity, how big was what you considered Claude's best attempt to be?
What if you gave it an image comparison tool that would xor two screenshots to check its work?
I've tried doing stuff similar to the author, and it generally does not get better after the first attempt. I even tried supplying Claude with a delta view, ie. the difference in per-pixel output, along with the reference and current result, yet it was impossible for it to understand and remember the actual differences.
I have a very weird tangential nit to pick: gendering LLMs. I swear I'm not pushing any sort of gender agenda/discussion that can be had anytime anywhere else in the current age, but to me there is something quintessentially a-gendered about the output of a computer program.
Calling Claude (or GPT-5 or Gemini or my bash terminal for that matter) a "he" seems absurd to the point of hilarity.
In my mind, they've always firmly been "it"s.
Hm, Claude is a common male surname, especially in Europe. That plays into it. Also many people - including me - have personalised their AI chats, have given it names, even something resembling a personality (it's easy with prefix prompts). Why others do it, who knows, I do it because I find it a lot less frustrating when ChatGPT fucks up when it pretends to be a young adult female klutz.
Does it happen much with non-Claude models? If someone genders ChatGPT, it makes me worry that they're taking the character it's playing too literally. But if someone genders Claude, that seems pretty normal, given that it has a man's name.
This felt quirky to me as well, possibly because my native language is strictly gendered.
Sounds like the setup for a sexist comedian's routine. "Y'know, ChatGPT is totally a woman because she reminds me of my wife. She thinks it knows everything and is convinced she's right, when she's totally full of shit! And what's the deal with airline food?" Swap the gender depending on your target audience.
In other languages, chairs have a gender, along with other everyday items like scissors and it doesn't especially make logical sense, although you can squint and tell a story as why something is the gender that's been assigned. Thus making the gender of AI simply a matter"that's just how things are".
Wasn't it now (end of 2025) that Dario Amodei said Claude (or LLMs in general) would be doing almost all programming work?
This article is my typical experience with LLM coding. Endless correction and handholding, and manual cleanup of subtle mistakes. With no long-term learning from them.
Kinda makes me livid, the amount of false hype coming out of the mouths of the stewards of these investor-subsidized LLM companies.
But they're amazing Google replacements, and learning tools. And once in a blue moon they ace a coding assignment and delight me.
Edit: 90% of coding work by June to September 2025: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
I mean, Claude got 90% there. The author could contribute 10% of work to fix the alignment and have a finished page.
He assembled all the assets, did a bunch of prompting prep, etc. The alignment was kinda the main job, and he would have had to do a bunch of cleanup after. If this was a freelance job a client was paying for, I'd definitely tell myself to save cost next time by not using AI.
new LLM benchmark just dropped. 'draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle browsing spacejam 1996 on 640x480 ie6'.
Would be interesting to see whether Gemini could crack this problem.
In actual workflows someone would accept a very close reproduction and fix the small issues. Generally I use systems to get close enough to a scaffolding and / or make small incremental improvements and direct its design
Them: AI will take jobs.
The AI: https://chatgpt.com/share/6923df03-7304-8010-bd08-cd335f0ee9...
Skill issue
Honestly, if you had showed this article to me even eighteen months ago, I would have been blown away at how good of a job Claude did.
It's remarkable how high our expectations have been steadily creeping.
This comment is missing the point. The real goal of all this is not to amaze. It's to create better software. Let's graduate past the amazement phase into the realism phase as soon as possible. What parts of my project is the LLM for? That is the real question worth asking.
Oh, to be clear, this isn't a criticism. I think it's super cool that we're moving onto the nitpick/refinement phase of this tech. :)
We are actually spoiled at this point.
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Could you please stop posting this sort of indignant-sensational comment? It's not what this site is for, as you know (or should know).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dang, can you explain how this is indignant or sensational?
Anthropic's leadership and researchers continue to this day to post messages saying engineering will be fully automated. I can go find recent messages on X if you'd like.
This forum is comprised mostly of engineers, who will be the most impacted if their vision of the world pans out.
YC depends on innovation capital to make money. If the means of production are centralized, how does YC make any money at all from engineers? Such a world will be vertically and horizontally integrated, not democratically spread for others to take advantage of.
Now I don't think that's what's going to happen, but that's what the messaging has been and continues to be from Anthropic's leadership, researchers, and ICs.
Why should we support companies like this?
We shouldn't we advocate for open models where any market participants can fully utilize and explore the competitive gradients?
I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here.
Furthermore, if this pans out like it seems it will - a set of three or four AI hyperscalers - we'll also be in the same situation we have today with the big tech hyperscalers.
Due to a lax regulatory environment, these companies put a ceiling on startup exits by funding internal competition, buying competitors, etc. I don't see how the situation will improve in an AI world.
If you're a capitalist, you want competition to be fierce and fair. You don't want concentration of power.
I can see how an Anthropic IC might not like this post, but this should be fairly reasonable for everyone else who would like to see more distribution of power.
"want to automate our jobs away", "Asmodai and team want you working in line at McDonald's", "You're a serf" all obviously fit that description.
Low-information, high-indignation rhetoric is exactly what we don't want here, so please don't post like this.
Fair enough, I'll temper the rhetoric.
It still seems you can make the front page posting these words as long as they're externally hosted. Or maybe it's the fact Anil is a bit of a celebrity:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46128548
Hey man, there's a world of difference between what's essentially a tweet (HN comment) and an article.
If you wanna make charged statements, at the very least substantiate them. (To be clear: I don't necessarily disagree with you, but you gotta admit your language is emotionally laden and lacks substance.)
Thank you for the calibration.
I've been seeing a lot of Anthropic folks talking (rather gleefully) about ending our profession recently, and it's getting on my nerves.
I don't believe their timelines or unassailability. And even if our jobs do come to an end, I believe in work after work. I'm just not a fan of the almost smug assuredness or their apparent crusade against ICs.
maybe ask it to use 1990s table based layout approaches?
Interesting. I just looked at the page source and it is in fact using a table layout. I always assumed it was an image map, which I assume would be even more obscure for the LLM.
We should check the Wayback Machine, but in my memory this was built with an image map. Maybe like, 10 years ago or something. I was googling around when writing this post and saw that there are folks still tasked with making sure it's up and running. I wonder if they migrated it to tables at some point in the last decade.
The January 1997 version used a server-side image map served via CGI: https://web.archive.org/web/19970124032137/http://spacejam.c...
This was soon moved to a static table layout with higher quality images: https://web.archive.org/web/19970412180040/http://www.spacej...
This basically boils down to AI being unable to "center a div". I see this very often, AI generated slop is has LOTS of "off by one" kind of bugs.
Why not just host a copy from waybackmachine?
Why do I feel like the old man yelling at clouds that programmers refuse to use their brains anymore?
It's funny, the joke that good programmers are lazy, has always held until now.
"there is no other way to preserve it"
Bullshit. Right click -> view source
Or just press ctrl+s and the browser will also gather all the assets into a folder for you.
The arrogance of thinking that the only way you know how is the only way....
You literally forgot the save feature all browsers have just because you set out to "solve" this using "ai"
The statement is almost certainly made in jest, since it is obviously untrue. Sometimes adding silly artificial constraints can be a fun way to spark creativity.
Please read the sentence right after the one you quoted. You removed to context to shit on him :(
this is just AI brainrot disease
Help, I can't recreate a website with AI! There's no other way, no way I could fix up some HTML code! Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree!
Absolutely disgusting.
I’m pretty confident the author was being sarcastic
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Why involve an LLM in this? Just download the site?
Yeah, Internet Archive has lots of copies https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.spac... also
What's with the panicked pleas and need to preserve the site, assuming locally...?
The post is clearly about something else than preserving https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
It seems to me the post is about how Claude fails to recreate a very simple website from 1996.
You last-minute cancelled coffee with your friends to work on this? I'm not sure how I would feel if a friend did that to me.
Based on the later life updates, I suspect this was being humorous.
> After these zoom attempts, I didn't have any new moves left. I was being evicted. The bank repo'd my car. So I wrapped it there.
Somehow I suspect Claude Code (in an interactive session with trial, error, probing, critiquing, perusing, and all the other benefits you get) would do better. This example seems to assume Claude can do things in "one shot" (even the later attempts all seem to conceal information like it's a homework assignment).
That's not how to successfully use LLM's for coding in my experience. It is however perhaps a good demonstration of Claude's poor spatial reasoning skills. Another good demonstration of this is the twitch.tv/ClaudePlaysPokemon where Claude has been failing to beat pokemon for months now.
Using https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/... with style-supporting instructions and context would've improved the outcome as well.
Is the skill effectively just adding a little extra context here though? Doesn’t strike me as the sort of context that would improve the outcome.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
thank you! I'll try this
Not a homework assignment, and no deliberate attempt to conceal information, just very long and repetitive logs. A lot of the same "insights" so I just didn't provide them here.
> That's not how to successfully use LLM's for coding in my experience.
Yeah agree. I think I was just a little surprised it couldn't one-shot given the simplicity.
> Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot.
Why not use wget to mirror the website? Unless you're being sarcastic.
$ wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent http://example.org
Source: https://superuser.com/questions/970323/using-wget-to-copy-we...
The stuff about not being able to download it is a bit of a joke and I don't think the tone landed with everybody haha. This was just an experiment to see if Claude could recreate a simple website from a screenshot, of course to your point you could download it if you wanted.
Because that wasn't the goal of this exercise