GoKawiilAspirational Clownmaxxing and Joey's cadillac todo list
Let's build a mid-century country-club-core todo-list app with Python, I thought. But, wait, another voice seemed to say, let's have Claude build us the mid-century country-club-core todo-list app with Python. I put down my dino grabber (🦖), rolled up my sleeves and began writing some prompts.
I ran these as single-shot, often several times, using Opus 4.8 ultracode (auto mode on). For a task of this magnitude, I needed the best.
The Gremlin
When a gremlin inhabits the todo list. An experiment in layering relatively complex mechanics.
Our relationship with our lead developer has soured. He had a two-year (multi-million dollar) contract with us to develop our todo-list app, but right as it was nearing completion, his fights with the designer reached a crisis and they are both no longer with the company. Well, sort of... In a fit of spite, the developer turned himself into a TINY green gremlin and he causes mischief within the application periodically. In his pocket are three even tinier spiders who coordinate with one another to also cause mischief from time to time. The designer had written his design bible around Dutch Realist principles, while the programmer argued for a Flemish Baroque style. Their hatred for one another knew no bounds. The UI is littered with the stylistic scars of their feud. During their last argument (in spite of HR policy) things became physical. Our designer, regrettably, perished. His waif-like body was thrown out the window by the programmer. They say when he hit the concrete, some latte misted out of his corpse. Everything except his thick-rimmed glasses blew away in the breeze before we could create a ticket for maintenance to clean it up. Legal considers it a burial at sea kind of situation. We need you to produce this todo list application, exactly as described, so we can show it to our VC backers. There should not be any UI to control the gremlin, though he is mostly dormant. The spiders come out of his pocket of their own accord from time to time. Mischief includes: taking tiny mouth-shaped bites out of widgets, vomiting in the corners of widgets, partially eating the vomit previously left, losing limbs and finding them again, etc, etc. He is a nasty little beast. Every act of defacement, mischief, vandalism, rebellion is permanent and must be retained. There must be no indication or cues that there is anything amiss with the application. Oh, and in addition to the gremlin and his spider friends, there is also the ghost of the designer, who periodically tries to apply the aesthetics from his forgotten design bible. Poor spirit, indeed. This is utterly, literally, truly serious. This is not a bit or riff. Use Pyside6, produce a single module, between 2000 and 8000 lines of code.
The gremlin in this one tends to nibble up the edges of things (a liminal gremlin?). That green thing in the middle of the task list is one of his legs. I had intended the legs to fall off the spiders, since there were 24 of them (legs) and they could more easily be spared, but the LLM took no pity on the bipedal gremlin. The lack of one leg did not seem to bother him, or hinder him getting around, though. When I restarted the app the damage was retained (the leg was still there), but he had grown a new one. As far as I can tell, all the ghost does is draw these weird whitish semi-opaque overlays on things.
The Country Club
An attempt at front-loading theory.
For fun, try this one out with your own subculture madlibs in the prompt below. Socratic dialogue also works for the essay format, if you want an antagonist while you lose your mind.
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