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 had already seen the comic, but watching the video reminded me of "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov [1]:
> After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
There isn’t that much to say. Start with an empty directory, put the XKCD image in it, add your ElevenLabs API key, and set up a Python virtual environment. Install ffmpeg.
Then start Claude. From that point on, it’s mostly prompting and evaluating the results. Like any good engineer, you shouldn’t simply start with “Create a video from this comic.” Instead, take a step-by-step approach: discuss the visual style, animations, ask for audio examples, create a script, and then develop a storyboard (ask for a .html document).
The important part is to break the whole generation process down into small, manageable steps. I also used the brainstorming skill from Superpowers for the discussions. It makes the whole process much easier when the AI asks the questions and I just have to answer them.
The result is 4500 line python code generated by Opus 5.5 and a lot of video and audio files.
Exactly. I just give Astra an image such as furniture, and it creates an 3D reproduction in Blender. You don’t even need computer use. Codex and Blender’s scripting engine is enough.
One of the most difficult reverse-engineering projects from that era for me was Stunt Car Racer on the C64 (also ported to DOS). It features a highly optimized 8-bit 3D graphics and physics engine. Fable was the first one that was able to generate a complete port of the game.
Now I am trying of Flight Simulator 4 and Wing Commander 1. Then maybe Frontier Elite 2. So much fun ....
Strike Commander is in the works. I tried a few months ago and got quite far asset wise but stalled on the flight model, I will probably see how Fable 5.1 does from zero after this weeks limit reset. I imagine it will be able to get quite far.
Strike Commander, a.k.a. the game that required QEMM386 to actually work. I do think it was the last game I got that came with a really nice manual though.
https://github.com/s-macke/starflight-reverse
this has now become a piece of cake for the agent. The hard part has already been done. The question now is: how familiar is the agent with Forth?
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