Comment by Aldipower
2 days ago
Reading the blog post, prompting Claude setting up Playwright etc. takes at least one hour maybe more? Not seeing where your 5 minutes coming from.
2 days ago
Reading the blog post, prompting Claude setting up Playwright etc. takes at least one hour maybe more? Not seeing where your 5 minutes coming from.
author here -- it took like 5 minutes of actual attention from me? I'm not sure why you are counting reading the blog post or setting up playwright. I guess I did read the blog post, but im not sure that should count. And claude set up playwright, not me.
[dead]
“Setting up playwright” is about two sentences of a prompt to Claude. I know this because I’ve done it many times. The authors prompt in the post is only a few hundred words. (Most of the post is just LLM output.) I’m certain I could type that out in 5 minutes.
Do we really need another post where I time how long it takes to prompt Claude to create the Space Jam website?
its less than a few hundred words. The full total of what I typed into claude to get the first version is:
Initial prompt:
> I am giving you:
> 1. A full screenshot of the Space Jam 1996 landing page (screenshot.png)
> 2. A directory of raw image assets extracted from the original site (files/)
> Your job is to recreate the landing page as faithfully as possible, matching the screenshot exactly.
> Use the webapp-testing skill. Take screenshots and compare against the original. <required>You must be pixel perfect.</required>
plan response:
> they should all go to tilework.tech
> exact screenshot dimensions
which is 75 words
> But which takes longer: learning all of web dev to code the site, or learning to tell Claude to doff pixels?
As a developer, I naturally prefer the former over the latter, as this becomes general programming knowledge that I can benefit from in later projects.
BTW one of the creators of the Space Jam Website left a comment on the blog post: " Sebastien Derenoncourt 20m
I must say as a person who worked on that original website, I am confused why you needed claude to do so much basic HTML/css we didn't even use tons of complex CSS until much later in time... "
If we both agree that prompting is net positive on time, I think we’re in agreement. You are trying to move the discussion to some sort of philosophical point about knowledge gain and subjective experience, but that is definitely not what I was going for.
3 replies →
When I did it, vanilla Claude (Max5, default Opus 4.5, no special skills loaded, etc) had playwright up and running for screenshots in minutes (after intervening to tell it to use python 3.13 after noticing python 3.14 seems to be missing a lot of wheels and uv was rebuilding numpy for some reason) without me telling how to screenshot at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fluidcruft#46185996
(One fun wrinkle I enjoyed watching was I created the target screenshot in Firefox, and Claude was using playwright with Chrome. Ultimately, I have no idea whether either Firefox or Chrome has the correct actual fonts and I'm not a webdev and don't remember how to figure that all out)