Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
Recent models have been a big step up on graphics generation. Not exactly sure why, it would be neat if they would release any quantity of technical blogs.
Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call? What's the real value here? Quick money grab and wait for copies? Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
Then maybe the need for your site is gone. That’s a good thing in the sense that the problem is solved. If your goal is “do something in the cocktail space” (which is also roughly the companies’ goal I would say), indeed you should do what the AI can’t, which I’d say is be human touch. An AI can’t give your opinion or view.
Oh yeah, and I am not mourning or anything like that. And I do want the human touch, because AI can't. But humans, at least over the internet, can send their agents, or companies can run agents and I won't know from my site if it's an actual human, or some AI fabricated interaction (can't even trust an image it uploads).
When AI first showed up a few years ago, I thought about opening an actual physical cocktail bar. Hypothesizing humans will be tired after a long day of their agents talking to other agents, they would crave for actual humans. I would ban electronics inside - no distractions. Maybe one day I will go for that...
I personally am more interested about personal opinions about things like cocktails rather than whatever statistically average cocktail the matrices of chatgpt come up with.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
It doesn't need to recreate your game. It can still muddy your marketing and redden the ocean. Especially if someone is in the business of trying to front run an indie game, they don't need to be any where close to a full or good game to attempt to steal any mindshare your project had.
Details have a huge impact on how fun a game is. So far the vibeslop games I've seen look about as fun as crappy unity assets flips or mobile games. every so often the Instagram algo will show me some post a long the lines of "The game industry is finished!" and there is no way anyone can seriously looks at the games in those posts and say they look fun to play.
And someone trying to vibe copy another person's game is definitely the type who has no idea of value to add. So many of the slop games the whole concepts are so generic that they definitely just asked chatgpt for everything.
In the modding scenes for some games I play I've seen vibe coded mods where the gameplay additions make no sense and have no sense of balance or fun, with these completely new to the community devs having ko-fi links set up from the start.
What I think of is all the HD remasters out there which look disastrously worse than the original, at least in my eyes. Why does this happen? Are the best artists working on new games instead? Are remasters pushed out with less care, shorter schedules, and less budget? Maybe some combination… and maybe there are some parallels with quick, mostly unsupervised LLM copies of a game.
From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable, just like most of the games people make in devlogs. There’s very little thunder to be stolen in the first place.
> From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable
It's it possible for an LLM-created game to be profitable but "unsuccessful?"
For instance, if (on average) if it costs $100 in tokens and time to make a crappy LLM-game clone, but you can clear $200 in sales per game on average, you're ahead.
And the economics of slop mean there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries who will make all that effort for a $100 payout (or less).
I’m sure somebody out there is pointing an LLM at things and getting a $200 average payout or better on $100 in tokens, but if your game is getting copied for $100 in tokens, I’m not sold on the idea that you were going to make money in the first place.
> but if your game is getting copied for $100 in tokens
My point is they don't actually have to do a good job, they need to make a pile of shit that looks just good enough to trick a few people into buying it.
> indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
Here’s an easy proxy: Did you feel the need to build it because nothing to your liking existed? Did it take some effort to build? Do others feel the need to use your thing for those reasons?
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
I don't think "is my SaaS better than others" is the important question, instead "is SaaS going to be valuable in a cheap bespoke software future".
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
I believe it completely depends on your values and perspective, as a poor analogy: when mobile apps were a novelty a bunch of them were just that, novelties, the beer drinking app, the flicking a Zippo-esque app, and many more that hadn't much functionality, were more a tech demo, cool toys, etc.
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
I used to think like this, but eventually I realized it's mostly just a way to pat yourself on the back. And ironically, I rarely saw people doing significant things waste energy talking like that, since there's no benefit in the exercise.
Very few things can't be reduced to insignificance. MacOS was just cribbing PARC, Facebook is just a glorified PHP forum, Dropbox is just SFTP, etc. etc.
Even in deep-tech, Zipline is just wrapping from deeper-tech (batteries motors etc), GLP-1s were a VA throwaway that dusted off, etc. etc.
LLM wrapper doesn't mean anything, it's an implementation detail. Besides being an LLM wrapper what is a given thing?
The beer app wasn't just a beer app, it was the intersection of the first time accelerometers were doing something that the average consumer could interact with in their pocket, the first time there was something to spend money on for your phone besides a wallpaper, a ton of things.
If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
Typically maintenance, reliability, support and liability; nothing new in SaaS land. Lots of companies have the money to hand-roll things that are provided by some external SaaS but would much rather it was someone else’s problem.
Also for creatives, some sort of aesthetic control? Most of the examples on this page look like templates you’d see in an office suite that appear swish, but are ultimately bland.
Even if I could answer your question (which I can't), things change so fast right now that it might not be valid for long. All you can do is be willing to rapidly adapt and stay focused on where your product adds value.
>Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
Nope. If all your doing is prompting an agent to build stuff (especially if what it is building is based on LLMs), then you might as well take it back to the whiteboard and rethink how you're spending your time/tokens.
You'd be surprised how much money companies throw at very simple products, I'm working for a company making 100k mrr and was virtually entirely vibe coded by one dev until very recently
These explainer videos are garbage, whether done by humans or not. Just like those crappy Netflix "documentaries". Don't get me wrong, it's impressive, but it's just a more automated way of outputting low effort, low quality content
These aren't even that good in comparison to the stuff being posted on Reddit and twitter/X.
Some of the stuff I've seen is mindblowingly impressive in how they've captured quality creative decisions, and how the models can reason about visually appealing designs.
It understands things like continuity, themes, facial expressions, cultural memes/references, symbolism, etc. And it generates things using a lot of multi-modal behavior by using 3d, images, etc.
Agreed. Just yesterday, I recreated the XKCD comic “A Bunch of Rocks” (https://xkcd.com/505/) as a video. It took me about five hours, using ElevenLabs for the audio and a step-by-step process involving brainstorming, planning, storyboarding, and so on. Opus 5.5 has become remarkably capable.
I've been experimenting with AI video generation beyond raw video gen for some time now. Opus 4.5 was the first tool I tried last year, and it was okay...
Fast forward a few months, and Opus 5.5 is now running my entire video production pipeline. This model is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous model.
I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. It creates thumbnails and titles, handles the entire process, and automatically uploads the result via the YouTube API—all powered by a Claude Code plugin. (youtube.com/@ctrlaltexplain for those interested).
Indeed, it's really great.
It does the smartest thing of all: it creates an HTML page and uses raw JS timed animations to make it work. Then it records it with ffmpeg and saves the output as the final video.
About 6 months ago I spent 12 hours creating a video for our Edge.js [1] announcement that, in the end... people were not very inspired by (to say the least). See the video here [2].
Then, about a month ago, I spent 6 hours creating a video for our Wasmer SDK announcement. It was better, but still didn't go as viral as I wanted [3]. I always thought we would need a big budget to do them.
But then, yesterday I tried Opus 5.5... and man, I'm impressed. The video was one-shotted with this prompt:
Make a modern slick and punchy video for this announcement:
[content of the blogpost in markdown]
I believe it captures each of the frames as png and then ffmpeg puts them together as a video. Although someone from Anthropic may be able to explain this better
I had Sol 5.6 about a month ago populated a test account, take screen shots, write a script, used ElevenLabs TTS, with Remotion. It did an amazing job.
One important difference between animations/videos generated by Opus 5.5 and the stereotypical AI slop videos is that Opus 5.5 is not a video generation model: it generates and iterates the code and renders it, and there are various ways for it to do so.
This one's been stuck in my head since yesterday. I just keep thinking about how long this woulda taken in After Effects. So I was experimenting with having Opus 5.5 make these kinda animations in javascript and realized I can get it to export a JSX script for AE. So I can have it take the first swing, then bring it into the tool I actually use.
Looking at the absolute dog shit Ai menus and posters I see everywhere I can guarantee you a good 70% of the population is physically unable to produce good things no matter the tools they have access to. They can't even be bothered to add "make it look good" to their prompt
I don't want to be a hater but I made this a while ago and I honestly think the videos are a good bit nicer than what you are creating with Opus 5.5. https://mnfst.video/
I suppose we should've seen this coming (and many did) in the 80s. This is the late stage of digital and computerised media. We conned ourselves for a few decades into thinking this was a new medium for art or a new frontier of human communication, but in reality we were just training a simulacrum of reality, devoid of meaning or intent.
This is just taking an existing presentation slides skill and generating a video out of it. There are no drawings and animations that explain the actual concepts.
Made entirely with Opus 5.5 + $3.21 of OpenRouter API usageClaude Code Workflow
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wogab3/
Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wovwao/
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
And here's what I did with ChatGPT a few days ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab59877-4b74-83e8-8da5-966d9f3a38...
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
Oh yeah, and I am not mourning or anything like that. And I do want the human touch, because AI can't. But humans, at least over the internet, can send their agents, or companies can run agents and I won't know from my site if it's an actual human, or some AI fabricated interaction (can't even trust an image it uploads).
When AI first showed up a few years ago, I thought about opening an actual physical cocktail bar. Hypothesizing humans will be tired after a long day of their agents talking to other agents, they would crave for actual humans. I would ban electronics inside - no distractions. Maybe one day I will go for that...
Eg from your share, the model output “I prefer it Scotch-heavy rather than 50/50 because otherwise it gets very sweet.”
It’s basically cribbed this from someone; it literally can’t taste.
The frontier labs are not yet able to do rlvr over mixology/meatspace. So maybe think on how to capitalize on that.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
(It's not a great game)
The whole problem with LLMs is that you don't need the detail.
And someone trying to vibe copy another person's game is definitely the type who has no idea of value to add. So many of the slop games the whole concepts are so generic that they definitely just asked chatgpt for everything.
In the modding scenes for some games I play I've seen vibe coded mods where the gameplay additions make no sense and have no sense of balance or fun, with these completely new to the community devs having ko-fi links set up from the start.
An LLM "recreation" doesn't have to be complete or very good. It just has to steal enough thunder to be profitable.
It's it possible for an LLM-created game to be profitable but "unsuccessful?"
For instance, if (on average) if it costs $100 in tokens and time to make a crappy LLM-game clone, but you can clear $200 in sales per game on average, you're ahead.
And the economics of slop mean there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries who will make all that effort for a $100 payout (or less).
My point is they don't actually have to do a good job, they need to make a pile of shit that looks just good enough to trick a few people into buying it.
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
So, a patent?
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
Very few things can't be reduced to insignificance. MacOS was just cribbing PARC, Facebook is just a glorified PHP forum, Dropbox is just SFTP, etc. etc.
Even in deep-tech, Zipline is just wrapping from deeper-tech (batteries motors etc), GLP-1s were a VA throwaway that dusted off, etc. etc.
LLM wrapper doesn't mean anything, it's an implementation detail. Besides being an LLM wrapper what is a given thing?
The beer app wasn't just a beer app, it was the intersection of the first time accelerometers were doing something that the average consumer could interact with in their pocket, the first time there was something to spend money on for your phone besides a wallpaper, a ton of things.
If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
Also for creatives, some sort of aesthetic control? Most of the examples on this page look like templates you’d see in an office suite that appear swish, but are ultimately bland.
Nope. If all your doing is prompting an agent to build stuff (especially if what it is building is based on LLMs), then you might as well take it back to the whiteboard and rethink how you're spending your time/tokens.
The LLM only does average returns from average inputs.
Some SaaS products have network effects, but that doesn't appy to new software.
Starting a SaaS business in 2026 seems a bit silly to me. Not saying people won't make money, but you'd have to be pretty lucky.
Some of the stuff I've seen is mindblowingly impressive in how they've captured quality creative decisions, and how the models can reason about visually appealing designs.
It understands things like continuity, themes, facial expressions, cultural memes/references, symbolism, etc. And it generates things using a lot of multi-modal behavior by using 3d, images, etc.
Some really incredibly impressive stuff.
[0] https://simulationcorner.net/A_Bunch_of_Rocks.mp4
No way to download or watch it in the webapp of opencomputer. No instructions on what to do? Do I need to run it locally? It seems it did use usage.
Fast forward a few months, and Opus 5.5 is now running my entire video production pipeline. This model is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous model.
I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. It creates thumbnails and titles, handles the entire process, and automatically uploads the result via the YouTube API—all powered by a Claude Code plugin. (youtube.com/@ctrlaltexplain for those interested).
About 6 months ago I spent 12 hours creating a video for our Edge.js [1] announcement that, in the end... people were not very inspired by (to say the least). See the video here [2].
Then, about a month ago, I spent 6 hours creating a video for our Wasmer SDK announcement. It was better, but still didn't go as viral as I wanted [3]. I always thought we would need a big budget to do them.
But then, yesterday I tried Opus 5.5... and man, I'm impressed. The video was one-shotted with this prompt:
This is what Claude Opus 5.5 one-shotted (tl;dr: we went viral): https://x.com/wasmerio/status/2102849543260029379[1] https://edgejs.org/
[2] https://x.com/wasmerio/status/2033966082944577693
[3] https://x.com/wasmerio/status/2094845905379922302
Exactly how? What does ffmpeg record?
What exactly renders the video from the HTML page?
The code for the infamous "I'm upping my p(doom)" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU) is open-source and uses Processing: https://github.com/JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo
So predictable.
I asked it to make a site for my TI4 reference project: https://axiomvortix.com
It produced a video about an AI startup with the vague goal of centralizing data.
(not that they were great before, but ...)
If you're the author congrats, great work!