Almost burned up my laptop within seconds of visiting the site. I thought at first it was something like that quite interesting windows 95 on the web demo (which may have been AI-generated too afaik), alas it was just some pretentious AI-generated art piece with little technical value (IMO). Still would have been a nice art piece even with the performance issues if it was (mostly) handwritten, but token-churned art just doesn't have the same feel, especially when it also tries to destroy your computer.
As someone who knows something in the space he brags about, it is fascinating to see the dunning kruger effect in realtime here. Even with all those claudes in “adversarial review”.
Realtime soft lighting is possible on mobile but if he had known that, i bet claude woulda been able to do it but he didnt.
If there was even the speckle of curiosity, he would have asked beyond “dont make mistakes” but i guess he was too busy riding his bike while burning 50k to make a blog.
Personally, I am stunned at how fast - and autonomously - you can get to a very decent 80/20 result with AI these days. And since Opus 5.5 was released I really think it hit another level.
As an example, this was a "silly" one-shot prompt/result I created/received, which goes into a similar direction of what Felix created in terms of UX and aesthetics:
Sure it lacks the finish and attention to detail. But this was one prompt (vs. 60 threads).
Thoughts: I find this both exciting and a bit unsettling. Idea-to-product time in tech just keeps shrinking and shrinking. I feel limited by my own ideas now (1), and by the fact that everything still remains "digital" - ChatGPT still can't build me a house or fix my broken knee (2).
Realtime soft lighting is possible but at what cost, for such static scene? I think the light bake technique he used is, in fact, the appropriate way to get beautiful visual results with the upside of good performance in any hardware. It's curious to say Dunning Kruger effect when I do believe the decision reached is possibly conscious about the performance shortcomings of bouncing light in real time
I agree about what you mean with the dunning kruger effect. A similar effect is when I work with AI in a field where I don't know as much, and I would think that the AI works much better there or even has more than expert knowledge. So I do not (necessarily) overestimate myself, but the AI's capabilities, which can be as dangerous for society.
(Note that latest research shows that the dunning kruger effect might only be a statistical artefact.)
so true. gui might be just a niche eventually. let alone sitting in front of a screen 8h/day. Or as Felix wrote - he did most of this from his phone, in part while riding a bike
I used to live in this area in Berlin and immediately recognized it. It's weird, broken, dirty, rough and somehow exciting. And I'm gonna join the good tradition of people saying that it used to be better in the past because big money(tm) took over and changed things for the worse.
it loads as a plain text site in Brave with WebGL disabled - I had to re-open it in Chrome to see the actual fancy thing only after seeing the comments here
Not concerned at all ^^; "he built the website in 24 hours" is great marketing for Claude. Now everyone wants to try building their own website the same way and burn tokens.
I disagree, Flash was a real battery sucker on Android. Native CSS animations were usually smooth in Chrome; Firefox still hasn't caught up entirely on that front I feel.
Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.
In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.
It's a runtime issue. .swf format is highly optimized, but it was poorly ported to iOS at that time. Adobe didn't even try.
Also the observation is kinda biased. Reimplement the same kind of animation with h5, you'd drain your battery quickly and eat your cpu0 as well. Webkit made lots of optimizations during the years.
I don't know if it was ever really ported to iOS, I've only used it on Android as a mobile platform.
Native plugins were universally bad. Flash was the best of the bunch, but it was still a major issue. Great potential ruined by problematic implementation.
.swf is a fine format, but the software required to display it in a browser was awful. I'm glad it's dead even though I'm sad we lose so much of the old internet now that it's buried.
Ruffle has been doing great for most games and animations, though. It has a similar startup + init + load time Flash player used to have, but without the myriad security vulnerabilities that plagued the web back when native plugins were still a thing.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't get upset about Flash for any real technical reason. Adobe's CEO didn't entertain his bullshit so Steve threw a hissyfit and kicked Flash off Apple's platform. No technical merits can stand up the arbitrary whims of a billionaire CEO.
I don’t know about a III but Flash was good in the early/mid 2000’s while I was attending university.
Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.
I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.
This is both creative and soulless at the same time. It runs like puke and reading the creating of, it is obvious why.
AI still cannot solve ignorance and all these examples from and of people/anthropic really showcase this. It is like watching a monkey shake a box of crayons until something interesting comes out.
Anthropic 30k mrs a day, custom version control to handle the churn vs some dude and an email list.
Everything that ever had value went the same way: food, art, motorcycles, tourism... you visit somewhere or buy something that looks exciting and 9 times out of 10 it's soulless, industrially produced, mass-targeted and ends up worth less than the money you spent on it.
It's surprising to feel that way about code projects. For most people computers always were soulless machines without anything creative associated with them. Now we're in a strange inversion of history where people who never had any idea what to do with a computer suddenly feel very creative talking to the cloud to ask it to rain down some weird and wonderful thing on them that they feel proud to post about on their social media.
Weird times. Anyway just wanted to say you're not alone.
I think the only controversial thing about this cute little homemade website is that he frames Electron as being a rebellion against the chaos of modern software, which, well.
Interesting, I find the 'mood' very cozy and welcoming. There's nothing nicer than a warm, dimly lit room with a computer (or in this case VCR) when it's cold and rainy outside :)
The stark landscape and accented voiceover seem to be inspired by the documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnY17CImaQ
The view from his window is from Warschauer Brücke in Berlin Friedrichshain or nearby. I have fond memories living in that area and working on my software day and night.
I love the website, but one thing scares me in his list of projects:
I also lived in Friedrichshain, Berlin during Covid. In fact, at the corner of Warschauer str. & Boxhagener Str. The first thing I noticed was the Mercedes Arena and the (Ost-)Bahnhof.
The remains of the wall, (Mauer) is not much visible from that point, but definitely gives certain hacker-vibes...
It is a marvelous thing. A beautiful app platform. Suddenly, one day, I was no longer Linux user without app. Linux app was standard. Everybody has Linux app. I had dual-boot Linux computer to play Valorant on Windows and to live normal life on Linux. And I use Mac at work. And it is all glorious because I no longer think about which is which. And there are people who are saying it is not amazing, but it is. I can hit Ctrl-R and the application refreshes. What an astounding tool.
For me the great app platforms:
* the terminal
* the iPhone/Android
* the web
And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.
I can’t find anything better than Electron/Tauri for building cross-platform desktop apps.
The browser engine is quite efficient and performant for building complex interfaces
The core of Electron can be made quite efficient and performant. It's just that commercial app developers have few incentives to dedicate significant time and effort towards optimization when modern PCs are this powerful:
You're missing the "for building complex interfaces" part. I would extend that to "for building complex interfaces with even basic accessibility features" though.
And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.
Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).
Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.
Native apps are not automatically more responsive or less bloated. Look at Xcode or Visual Studio vs VSCode. Performance is mainly the result of how much effort you want to put into optimization.
Almost burned up my laptop within seconds of visiting the site. I thought at first it was something like that quite interesting windows 95 on the web demo (which may have been AI-generated too afaik), alas it was just some pretentious AI-generated art piece with little technical value (IMO). Still would have been a nice art piece even with the performance issues if it was (mostly) handwritten, but token-churned art just doesn't have the same feel, especially when it also tries to destroy your computer.
Given their current role, it finally explains a lot of things about why I don't like Anthropic's UIs.
It froze my laptop after I clicked once.
Couldn't even SSH into it any more even though Tailscale showed it as alife. Had to reboot.
So this website definitely left an impression.
an in-depth post about how he made it: https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/
extremely fascinating details in here
As someone who knows something in the space he brags about, it is fascinating to see the dunning kruger effect in realtime here. Even with all those claudes in “adversarial review”.
Realtime soft lighting is possible on mobile but if he had known that, i bet claude woulda been able to do it but he didnt.
If there was even the speckle of curiosity, he would have asked beyond “dont make mistakes” but i guess he was too busy riding his bike while burning 50k to make a blog.
Personally, I am stunned at how fast - and autonomously - you can get to a very decent 80/20 result with AI these days. And since Opus 5.5 was released I really think it hit another level.
As an example, this was a "silly" one-shot prompt/result I created/received, which goes into a similar direction of what Felix created in terms of UX and aesthetics:
https://poster-pillar.sidequests.p-john.com/
Sure it lacks the finish and attention to detail. But this was one prompt (vs. 60 threads).
Thoughts: I find this both exciting and a bit unsettling. Idea-to-product time in tech just keeps shrinking and shrinking. I feel limited by my own ideas now (1), and by the fact that everything still remains "digital" - ChatGPT still can't build me a house or fix my broken knee (2).
Realtime soft lighting is possible but at what cost, for such static scene? I think the light bake technique he used is, in fact, the appropriate way to get beautiful visual results with the upside of good performance in any hardware. It's curious to say Dunning Kruger effect when I do believe the decision reached is possibly conscious about the performance shortcomings of bouncing light in real time
I agree about what you mean with the dunning kruger effect. A similar effect is when I work with AI in a field where I don't know as much, and I would think that the AI works much better there or even has more than expert knowledge. So I do not (necessarily) overestimate myself, but the AI's capabilities, which can be as dangerous for society.
(Note that latest research shows that the dunning kruger effect might only be a statistical artefact.)
+1 for supporting Vim movements on the virtual computer
I've seen a several AI-coded WebGL examples... I wonder if AI will mean the return of the Flash-style interactive websites.
A Claude supervising a fleet of Claudes on a fleet of Cloud VMs with intricate knowledge of all flights of white collar work (cf https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/).
Traditional software engineering is so dead for the 99% of use cases...
Yes, and so is this guy's website. Because who is going to interact with a computer-screen when we can just literally talk (as in: speak) to an AI?
so true. gui might be just a niche eventually. let alone sitting in front of a screen 8h/day. Or as Felix wrote - he did most of this from his phone, in part while riding a bike
Feels so strange to recognize what's out the window. I hope this cannot be used to find where they live!
It's from the public domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berin_Skyline_(39941...
It's the view off the Warschauer Bridge in Berlin, nobody actually lives there.
I live around the corner :D
Sure, but you don't live on it
I used to live in this area in Berlin and immediately recognized it. It's weird, broken, dirty, rough and somehow exciting. And I'm gonna join the good tradition of people saying that it used to be better in the past because big money(tm) took over and changed things for the worse.
You mean before they built the ugly Amazon tower next to it? Agree haha
Nice concept but I find the accessibility aspects really lacking. I suppose that was a non-goal.
it loads as a plain text site in Brave with WebGL disabled - I had to re-open it in Chrome to see the actual fancy thing only after seeing the comments here
what did it look like? always wanted to do something ambitious like this, but feel it's an accessibility/compatibility nightmare.
For a moment I felt like Flash and Director are back but I guess you call this UI-maxxing nowadays.
Feeling like a Gabocorp moment?
https://youtu.be/zs34g9jBUhg
Not concerned at all ^^; "he built the website in 24 hours" is great marketing for Claude. Now everyone wants to try building their own website the same way and burn tokens.
Ah, the “good“ old times of interactive flash websites.
In retrospective
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
> In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices
H5 animations performs much worse on all devices.
Flash animations like Felix's can run well on a Pentium III processor with 64MB memory.
I disagree, Flash was a real battery sucker on Android. Native CSS animations were usually smooth in Chrome; Firefox still hasn't caught up entirely on that front I feel.
Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.
In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.
> Flash was a real battery sucker on Android
> Flash freezing the entire tab
It's a runtime issue. .swf format is highly optimized, but it was poorly ported to iOS at that time. Adobe didn't even try.
Also the observation is kinda biased. Reimplement the same kind of animation with h5, you'd drain your battery quickly and eat your cpu0 as well. Webkit made lots of optimizations during the years.
I don't know if it was ever really ported to iOS, I've only used it on Android as a mobile platform.
Native plugins were universally bad. Flash was the best of the bunch, but it was still a major issue. Great potential ruined by problematic implementation.
.swf is a fine format, but the software required to display it in a browser was awful. I'm glad it's dead even though I'm sad we lose so much of the old internet now that it's buried.
Ruffle has been doing great for most games and animations, though. It has a similar startup + init + load time Flash player used to have, but without the myriad security vulnerabilities that plagued the web back when native plugins were still a thing.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't get upset about Flash for any real technical reason. Adobe's CEO didn't entertain his bullshit so Steve threw a hissyfit and kicked Flash off Apple's platform. No technical merits can stand up the arbitrary whims of a billionaire CEO.
I don’t know about a III but Flash was good in the early/mid 2000’s while I was attending university.
Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.
I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.
Excellent work, Claude.
Can we reverse engineer the prompt? Can we reverse engineer the meta prompt? Can we reverse engineer the meta^n prompt?
he wrote in-depth about how it was created https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/
Better yet, can we reverse engineer the engineer?
Im going to port it to Rust
I found myself inside a simulation simulating simulations of a simulation.
And it was good.
This is both creative and soulless at the same time. It runs like puke and reading the creating of, it is obvious why.
AI still cannot solve ignorance and all these examples from and of people/anthropic really showcase this. It is like watching a monkey shake a box of crayons until something interesting comes out.
Anthropic 30k mrs a day, custom version control to handle the churn vs some dude and an email list.
Everything that ever had value went the same way: food, art, motorcycles, tourism... you visit somewhere or buy something that looks exciting and 9 times out of 10 it's soulless, industrially produced, mass-targeted and ends up worth less than the money you spent on it.
It's surprising to feel that way about code projects. For most people computers always were soulless machines without anything creative associated with them. Now we're in a strange inversion of history where people who never had any idea what to do with a computer suddenly feel very creative talking to the cloud to ask it to rain down some weird and wonderful thing on them that they feel proud to post about on their social media.
Weird times. Anyway just wanted to say you're not alone.
I think the only controversial thing about this cute little homemade website is that he frames Electron as being a rebellion against the chaos of modern software, which, well.
Which tech stack did you use for this or is all Claude Code =)
He is a technical manager at Anthropic, so what do you expect?
I wonder how many millions of tokens it took.
Reminds me a bit (although less interesting) of the 2000s JK Rowling website.
W.o.W.!
the scary thing is that I love this slightly reactionary nostalgic design - mattering the content.
It probably does tell more about me than any technology or approach discussed here.
grrr...
Is he even happy? The website mood is so sad.
Interesting, I find the 'mood' very cozy and welcoming. There's nothing nicer than a warm, dimly lit room with a computer (or in this case VCR) when it's cold and rainy outside :)
It's just themed on a Werner Herzog documentary (which are inherently pretty gloomy). But also, who can say for sure
The stark landscape and accented voiceover seem to be inspired by the documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnY17CImaQ
It feels like it's trying to evoke Bioshock vibes or a similar retro-punk dystopia.
Well he did use the penguin that walks off into oblivion
You are the prototype of the jealous HN commenter.
The view from his window is from Warschauer Brücke in Berlin Friedrichshain or nearby. I have fond memories living in that area and working on my software day and night.
I love the website, but one thing scares me in his list of projects:
I also lived in Friedrichshain, Berlin during Covid. In fact, at the corner of Warschauer str. & Boxhagener Str. The first thing I noticed was the Mercedes Arena and the (Ost-)Bahnhof.
The remains of the wall, (Mauer) is not much visible from that point, but definitely gives certain hacker-vibes...
I should be career hopping some more.
I like this, is open source?
guide to how it was created: https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/
Unusable, my whole browser is hanging with that tab open.
That's pretty neat.
super nice website bringing to old time
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It is a marvelous thing. A beautiful app platform. Suddenly, one day, I was no longer Linux user without app. Linux app was standard. Everybody has Linux app. I had dual-boot Linux computer to play Valorant on Windows and to live normal life on Linux. And I use Mac at work. And it is all glorious because I no longer think about which is which. And there are people who are saying it is not amazing, but it is. I can hit Ctrl-R and the application refreshes. What an astounding tool.
For me the great app platforms:
* the terminal
* the iPhone/Android
* the web
And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.
Now we got desktop (electron) apps blocking our VPNs via friggin cloudflare. I have come to absolutely loath cloudflare's BS.
I can’t find anything better than Electron/Tauri for building cross-platform desktop apps. The browser engine is quite efficient and performant for building complex interfaces
You have an interesting definition of "efficient and performant".
The core of Electron can be made quite efficient and performant. It's just that commercial app developers have few incentives to dedicate significant time and effort towards optimization when modern PCs are this powerful:
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-electronAintBad
You're missing the "for building complex interfaces" part. I would extend that to "for building complex interfaces with even basic accessibility features" though.
And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.
Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).
Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.
Native apps are not automatically more responsive or less bloated. Look at Xcode or Visual Studio vs VSCode. Performance is mainly the result of how much effort you want to put into optimization.
Certainly the user does not feel the same.
Electron might be a good example of worse is better.
Electron was too good when I first saw it, and gave the "Javascript everywhere" for the desktop apps. Then quickly felt like a bloatware.
Like it or not, it was a significant achievement
Please post generic snarky swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To be fair; Node is involved in this too.
if (when) a better solution arises it will be the dominant solution. long live electron
Fyi, autoplays sound. Generally an unacceptable UI decision imho.
There is a button ”Enter muted” right below enter
I didn't click anything, the sound just started playing while there was a loading animation
What browser are you using? IE6?
Just kidding. But you must have clicked somewhere. Audio autoplay hasn't been a thing on the web for years (thankfully).
When you tap the screen on ipad while the page still loads (and doesnt show anything), it plays sound before you click enter
It auto played for me in iOS Safari with no interaction
Not for me. So there’s that. But tapping anywhere on screen does start the sound.
Hmm, here (macOS + Chrome) it starts with 'Sound off', says even so in the bottom right corner.
that's slick as hell
So good man
i like it
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