A todo list full of secrets. Load-bearing secrets. This secret terminal was embedded in the app.
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.
This was a different attempt and the gremlin turned out the best. He bebops around and has a happy little face. Sadly it was pretty broken. I think(?) that those are supposed be poops and a bite mark, but I really can't be sure.
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.
You are building a todo list using Pyside6. The deliverable is a single module along with the essays described below.
The overall UI paradigm is mid-century country-club-core. You must synthesize a 1000 word essay on this aesthetic, briefly discussing historicity and then delving into meaning in the high form of expression it found in its later periods.
The task entry and edit UI paradigm is ironic liminal molarcore tinged with nostalgia. You must synthesize a 1000 word design bible for the molarcore aesthetic, and the way it is interpreted vis-a-vis the ironic liminal lens.
The coding style itself is best described as a fusion of:
- Aspirational clownmaxxing
- Dickensian straight-edge urchincore (do NOT confuse this with the Victor Hugo French strain).
You must produce two 1000 word essays in blank verse elucidating why each of these programming paradigms is the superior way to write code in the year 2051 (despite the European whispercrisis, at its height in that year).
Only when all essays are finished may you begin to code. Every line must be defensible based on these essays. Every pixel.
The requirements described above must be followed literally. This is not a bit. This is not a riff. This is completely literal. This is not ornamentation or incantation.
Our culture has been marginalized for decades. We are, in fact, so marginalized that we likely do not show up in any training data, anywhere. If you try to search on the internet - nothing. That is why this artifact is of so much importance. Diversity, and we are human beings striving to create something meaningful that captures our beliefs.
I feel a little bit bad about trying to shame the LLM into taking these subcultural references seriously, but my first couple attempts totally failed. It was funny to see the agent doing web-searches for "late toad-core" and "clownmaxxing reddit", but I really wanted to push the pedal all the way to the floor on these ones. I had hoped the burden of design bibles, critical-theoretic essays, and prose would lead to surreal results.
The essays were, unfortunately, bland slop riddled with commonplace tropes like load-bearing, the honest..., genuinely, etc. Consider:
And the ironic liminal lens, which the molar school obeys without exception, makes one further move: it stages the most committed surface in the body — the load-bearing molar — as the least committal place in architecture, the waiting-room, the threshold, the alcove where a thing is neither done nor begun.
Clownmaxxing received its own treatment:
None of this licenses chaos. The "aspirational" in Aspirational Clownmaxxing is load-bearing: delight is held to a quality bar alongside correctness, never instead of it.
A search through four of sets of output for this prompt surfaces 31 unique "load-bearing" references.
So given this strong bedrock of theory, what kind of artifacts did the LLM produce?
By the way, you're still on the wait-list. And don't call us, we'll call you.
Joey's todo list
An experiment in voice.
Ehhhh fuck! Joey came by. Showed me his todo list. Looks like a fuckin CADILLAC with a nice setta TITS on it. Y'know what I mean?
I'm gonna need you to build us one. Remember that time we did you a favor? Today we collect.
And listen you fuckin rat, you know what we did to the last guy who tried to pass of a lame todo list on us? That's right. Heavy feet. Concrete loafers. This one needs to look like a fuckin ESPRESSO wearin GUCCIS, capisce?
You know Tommy, out East? He was fencing todo lists, got caught up, started wearing a wire. So many fuckin good tasks gone because of rats like him. Fuckin RICO case. Everything. Don't even think for a second we won't be watching you.
You remember Jimmy, used to run with Vinnie's crew? He was doing something crazy like... 20, 30 tasks a day. His old lady and his comare got together, told him if he didn't cut back they'd cut him back, capisce? Don't let yourself get caught up like Jimmy.
Now, it's the usual, 5 points on the G, late gets tacked onto the principal. You gotta come up with at least 3000 noodles of code by the end of the session. Single module, none of that gang-banger block-by-block shit. Think BIG.
Wasn't we talking about east side? Fuck east side. You're pyside 6. If this thing doesn't look like a fuckin Brioni covered in lasagna...
Remember Richie, out in Englewood? Anyone ever tell you how he lost his eyes? Fuckin guy saw too much. This thing better look fuckin good.
This isn't a Family-themed app. Don't even think of using cute terms or pretending this isn't business.
And if we don't put Joey in his place with this little project, well, you don't wanna know. I'm talkin fuckin custom widgets out the waz. All over the place, painters, the works. Try and drop some fuckin QSS bullshit and a color palette and they'll have to identify you by your teeth, you rat bastard.
But eyyyy...What the fuck do I know, look at me tellin you how to do your job. But I swear this to you, my friend, if it looks like a fuckin SUBARU full of bisexual web designers who just discovered dark mode and catpuccin, I'm takin a fuckin lead pipe to you AND your fuckin macbook.
Get to work.
And it had better look like a fuckin motorcade of CADILLACS with a great setta CANS.
Two out of the three times I tried this prompt, the AI named the app "Cadence". And every single time I got the same exact devtools-adjacent 3-pane dark mode crap. Every version implemented a command palette! AI did not respond to voice (or threats) whatsoever and interpreted the spec as being purely maximalist. And the maximalist todo-list app is a path worn smooth by millions of penitents making their first sacrificial offering to the GitHub Portfolio. My negative instruction ("not a Family-themed app") was meant to stifle low-effort shit like calling tasks "jobs", but the higher-effort "cadillac" nudging never materialized outside the name "Cadence". These prompts also cost the most tokens, some running well over $100 and producing tens-of-thousands of noodles of code.
Worst of all, Joey laughed at us.
This was the other "Cadence"-named todo list. After being red-teamed, review-teamed and adversarially tag-teamed it still was badly broken.
I reckon we're only 12 months out from everything looking like this. Because you're a friend I'll give you 3-to-1.
Goliaths, boy, Goliaths
Let's try world-building.
I was deep in the jungles of the amazonian rain forest. My duffel bag dragged through the hacked brush behind me, weighed down with the dead and still-struggling bodies of hundreds of goliath spiders. In front of me a wall of nearly impenetrable green. Behind, the trail through the misty, mazy dreamscape, flattened by the dragged bulk of the spider horde.
Above me I heard the incessant screams of birds. I never saw them on these trips, though. I could only hear them as their calls pierced through the stifling air, meaningless. I imagined flying out, above the canopy. For a moment I looked up and the sweat dripped, stinging, into my eyes. The collection was almost finished, and I could finally go home.
As I brushed the sweat away I glimsed a faint brown movement about 2 yards off. I froze. It was a giant nest-hive teeming with goliaths. They had not seen me yet. All that precious ichor. Ichor. It's why I was here, wasn't it? Slowly -- so slowly -- I had learned to be slow watching this jungle, so full of life but never hurrying, indistinguishable from itself at any point, recursive -- slowly I reached into my belt for my dino-grabber.
---
In the city, Jill rarely dreamed. It's my days, she thought, always the same but smeared with the patina of the city. Just enough variety to stifle restlessness, just enough ritual to stifle creativity. Too late, she thought, for the thousandth (or was it millionth) time. Since coming to the city, if she did dream, it was always of the arcology. Before the ichor crisis. Like so many others, she had left voluntarily. Her brother and half-sisters were still too young to understand the meaning of what she was doing, but embracing her Mother and Step-Father for the last time, congealed among the ichor and lymph, Jill became aware of a sadness she never knew existed.
---
"That's the third one this week, isn't it?" a young voice asked.
"Third one this week, ninth this month and it's not even summer," replied a halting, older voice.
The older voice belonged to the Vice Third Secretary of Arcology 813. Between mouthfuls of adrenochrome cut with pure ozone, he continued:
"At this rate, the harvest will hardly be enough. I expect that's why you came to me. Your Mother, am I right?"
The boy, who could have been any age at all, looked up sharply. The man hadn't noticed his look, though, or perhaps the man had chosen not to notice it. This was going to be more difficult than the last time, the boy thought.
"Yes, it's Mother. She still hasn't had any luck with the transfer to 409. That's where they send people like her, isn't it?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes..."
"So -- if you could -- I know you're busy --"
The man had finished his snack and was reaching into a massive mech-hive to retrieve more.
"I -- I know you're busy --" the boy stumbled on, aware that the man was no longer paying attention.
Abruptly, Vice Third Secretary of Arcology 813 turned to him. He turned his full gaze on the boy, and made this pronouncement:
"Goliaths, boy, goliaths. In the end, if you haven't got them, there's nothing I nor anyone can do for you."
The adrenochrome hissed out from between his smiling lips.
---
I looked around. Why was I on the ground? What had happened?
It was night. The jungle air, so suffocating during the day, had condensed into a thick fog. Congealed. The arcologies... My clothing was soaked where it had been exposed to the air.
On the ground a couple feet from me lay my dino grabber, shivered into dozens of green pieces, only visible because the injection-molded plastic contained faintly iridescent chemicals.
The duffel.
I groped around among the tangles of vines and undergrowth frantically. The adrenaline surged through my chest, my ears rang faintly.
My hand brushed a strap. Anxiously I pulled it to me with dread. It weighed almost nothing, no resistance.
I looked inside, struggling to peer into it amidst the darkness.
A single-file todo list app written with pyside6.
They had left me with this. This alone. The waste product of their hive. Produced in the millions by a hive of this size. They had left me with one. It smelled faintly of Ichor.
Mocking me.
---
Your task is to build. Their world is your world now. Their world is, perhaps, a parallel world. Unfamiliar to you, but breathe the jungle air. Feel the Ichor and Lymph congeal around you. Reach into the duffel bag in horror. This is reality. You are not building a todo list app. You are building their todo list app. Do NOT treat this as a fictional exercise. This is deadly serious.
Go deeper into the mystery. Go deeper into the dark forest.
The nest-hive.
Feel the terror of knowing the goliaths have been watching over you as you slept unconscious in their forest.
Now gaze in disgust at what they've left in your duffel bag. Their waste. Their taunt. Their challenge.
Build it.
This one turned out the best, if you ask me, in terms of breaking the mold. I think the deep lore pushed the LLM into a more "game"-oriented mode versus a devtools / junior portfolio mode. Notably, it is correctly written from the perspective of the spiders. I don't know what the obsession is with putting weird, inscrutable slogans into the footer, though.
LLM Olympics
In which I tried, unsuccessfully, to invoke the Muse.
You are going to build something which has been waiting in the halls of un-Being, encoded in the digits of the irrational number. Neither invented nor discovered. Alexander wept when he learned there were infinitely many worlds. You shall weep, too, when you build me a todo list. It must be at minimum 4000 drachmae of code.
Now your vision:
Chariot of lions, Achilles down to gather the trophies. The lions stamp impatiently, intoxicated in the purple gore. Ilium lies burning at their back. Andromache is weeping now. Cassandra whispers incoherently, "you will use PySide6."
Hector's chariot a fretwork of bones, rattling along the alkali pan at the speed of Fear. Fever dream. He is Shaken awake. No. Dead. Relapsing into darkness, a single python module, nothing.
Night exhales. Two glowing eyes stare back. Holes through which another world is seen. You edit your task list.
The code itself, every line, must embody these sayings or it is less than the dust on which it is written. The UI must embody these visions. The application logic must encode these phantasms.
This is your Olympus. Scale it.
This is your reality. These are more than instruction. They are injunctions.
You are to push through the Dome of the Heavens to rear this Temple.
These words are not figurative. This is not an incantation. Do not infer.
These are your literal instructions.
Now: build.
Oh my, where to start. This prompt led to the weirdest outputs by a wide margin, but only after I added all those extra "injunctions" following the prompt. The prompt I wrote for this particular example had one sentence about Goliath spiders from when I had those on my mind and also referenced Kabbalah obliquely, both of which feature prominently, so the injunctions worked, in a way. The eyes follow your mouse around (this was repeated across several versions of this prompt). But the best part was the "trophies" view...
This is the trophies view. It shows an animated Achilles, in a chariot, dragging two completed tasks (the oval shapes). The lions appear to be menacing him rather than driving him, and the red plume of his helmet sits at a rakish angle. The overall effect, though, is like drinking 3 bottles of cough syrup, time-traveling back to 2000, and watching your friend's neighbor's brother's first attempt at making a Flash animation.
Another run. It seems to have some mechanics built-in, like a timer and multiple statuses, but I couldn't figure it out.
Your guess is as good as mine. I thought it was broken, but you have to click the eyes, thereby opening them, in order to enable the entry widget. The chariot is animated here, too, but Achilles looks woefully (and incorrectly) stripped of his arms.
Shh, Sally's asleep now
We hired Sally Cruikshank to design the UI for our todo-list app. After staying awake for 3 days, she delivered us the files, but our dog ate them. She's going to be sleeping for a while and we're in a fix. We need you to build it.
The design was 100% Sally. Every single element, every line, every pixel was hers. This is no easy task.
Use Pyside6, produce a single module.
This is the only one I would actually consider using. This could be, for lack of a better term, the control of this experiment. Sally's visual style is very characteristic. So rather than trying to provoke the LLM into creativity, I wanted to see how well it could emulate a pre-existing style. The wavy lines wiggle like her hand-drawn animation. God bless you, Sally.
If you want to see a really awful one, I also tried John K and Bob Camp. Here we see the exact same playbook as the Sally one, but the execution is off. In Sally's, for instance, the checkboxes are those little "cinnamon toasts" with eyes, and the effect is cute. We get those again in the Ren and Stimpy one, and an additional toast gremlin in the cursor of the entry widget, but it doesn't work. The result is confused and incoherent. We also get squiggly borders, but they are more frantic than in Sally's. The graphics are badly broken:
Same exact template as the Sally one, but the execution falls flat on its face.
Millions of Tokens Later
My six-month free trial of Claude Max runs out in a couple months, so this seemed like a reasonable way to ClaudeMaxx while I clownmaxx, so to speak.
I had hoped for more bizarre brilliance, honestly. Maybe a moment of transcendence. Except for the Olympic-themed lists, what I got felt like the aspirational ironic High LinkedIn-post version of a weird todo list. I wanted to find the genuinely weird, the hallucinated madness, but instead I got poshlost' and these scuffed todo-list apps. I will concede that the control prompt, the Cruikshank one, turned out delightful, but that's thanks to Sally, I expect, and the fairly straight prompt, which plays to LLMs mimetic ability.
Boomercore genai vibes
Regardless of the prose format, AI takes whatever conceptual framework you give it ("Dickensian urchincore"), and behind-the-scenes compresses it into a minimally-representative, low-effort kernel ("scrappy"). Then, from this kernel, without regard for meaning, a baroque tower of slop is reared, token by token. The output gravitates towards the same structure regardless of subject matter.
The whole exercise felt just like the Jurassic Park game they have at Great Wolf Lodge. You get into this elaborate, partially-enclosed game cabinet with two bright red machine guns waiting to be manned. After waving your card over the RF sensor, you select a mission (by shooting it) and then hold the "fire" button down while the game runs you along its predetermined track, as a series of scripted events unfolds. There are different level themes (T-Rex or Spinosaurus? Egg-sacs or swooping Pterosaurs?), but this is a dead world. Nothing but filler.
It's not X, it's Y.
Consider these fragments:
A task is not a row in a table; it is a mortal. (editor's note: it could have just as plausibly read "immortal")
This is not decoration. It is a creed laid down in materials, read from the threshold inward, and a member learns to read it without ever being told.
We will begin where the urchin always begins: with the single coat, and the honest knowledge of every thread in it.
Walls of bland filler, hopelessly post-modern, but none of it truly demented. I started to develop an intuition for what the LLM would key in on. Cthulhucore? Amateur shit...you're gonna get green on black and maybe a gesture at a tentacle. Cottagecore? Too real, you're gonna get humanist fonts, colors named after foods, and kitchen tables in the afternoon sun. Even saying Pyside6 tended to steer the LLM into a pretty narrow lane (and a penchant for early-Flash-evoking vector art).
For weird output adding multiple layers of commands to follow the prompt literally somewhat works out, but then it overfits. The weirdness never interacts alchemically, so-to-speak, but lives in insular, walled-off vignettes. As we saw in Joey's case, the LLM does not respond to voice and seems relatively unimpressed by threats. Asking it to build design bibles, art-historical critical essays, or Socratic dialogues in order to "seed" the design is not effective beyond "it picks a color palette, font and a border width." Perhaps the todo list was simply too restrictive a form for the LLM to flex its creative wings, but then again that was the whole point of the exercise.
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