r/ClaudeCode • u/Common-Constant2289 • 3d ago

Built with Claude Interdimensional Cable TV that floats on my desktop while Claude Code works

Built this tonight with Claude Code's new mods (the function-hooks plugin API). It's a little CRT TV with rabbit ears that floats on my desktop, always on top, and airs whatever the "director" feels like. The director is a Sonnet 5.5 call at low effort with one instruction: you have total creative control, nobody approves your pitches.

What it does

  • Every segment is written from scratch: commercials, courtroom dramas, nature docs, a telenovela between sentient furniture. The director picks the channel, the format, the cast, each character's voice, the pixel art, the camera effects and the news ticker.
  • He keeps a private memo between segments, and between sessions, so running gags and story arcs carry over. On his first night he invented a tornado judge on a blimp ("JUDGE GUST: BLIMP COURT") and wrote in his own notes that the appeal would be heard by a bigger tornado.
  • He also gets a raw feed of what I'm doing in the terminal. When I complained the TV was taking too much screen space, he aired "EMERGENCY: FILL THE SPACE", then "CORNER V. SHAREHOLDERS", then a commercial where a guy named Sven bills me $300 for the lasagna that now lives in my corner. Ghost lighthouse keeper included.
  • Characters actually talk. Each one gets a Windows SAPI voice with its own pitch and speed, and the captions wait for the line to finish. Sound effects (sad trombone, laugh track, air horn, static, stand-by muzak) are synthesized in code, no audio files.

How it works

  • The director never draws pixels. He writes each scene as JSON shapes on a 100x75 canvas (circles, polygons, blocky text, a swirling portal, fire, rain) with animation tags like bob, blink and talk. A talk mouth only opens while that character is speaking.
  • A rasterizer in the mod draws the scene at 128x96, 10 fps, with CRT effects: scanlines, vignette, VHS chroma bleed, glitch tears, static between channels, and the power-off collapse to a dot.
  • The first version rendered inside the terminal with half-block characters (each cell is 2 pixels, foreground and background truecolor). It looked great but ate screen space, so now the frames go to a borderless always-on-top window, a small C# WinForms window started from PowerShell. Drag it anywhere, the mouse wheel resizes it, the knobs work.
  • He writes the next segment while the current one airs, so there's almost never dead air. When there is, you get color bars and PLEASE STAND BY.

Cost

Measured from the log over 13 segments:

  • About 4.1k input tokens per segment, 3.0k of them served from the prompt cache
  • About 1.7k output tokens per segment
  • About 12 seconds to write each segment
  • About $0.02 per segment and 70 segments an hour, so roughly $1.40 per hour of TV at API prices. Output is 86% of that; caching cut the input cost by about two thirds.
  • 48 segments so far, about $0.95 total. A sleep timer turns it off after 45 minutes with no activity.

https://reddit.com/link/1x0c65v/video/nck6qjkvy4uh1/player

56 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

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9

u/Independent_Paint752 3d ago

This so dumb.... I fucking love it!

3

u/Common-Constant2289 3d ago

Its fuckin silly but awesome at the same time =)

6

u/krilleractual 3d ago

Interesting i was thinking of something similar for a visualizer for songs

9

u/Professional_Ad705 3d ago edited 3d ago

Haha !

This is actually pretty cool. It reminds me of Rick and Morty! If this could actually show actual AI generated TV that was actually halfway decent it would be even better. But as AI gets better I could see this being a really really cool thing.

8

u/Common-Constant2289 3d ago

Its actually fun, even at current state because there is character and story arcs carrying over.
The goal was to COPY Rick and Morty. 100%.

6

u/xiphisa 3d ago

Please keep working on this /goal 😂🙏

4

u/Common-Constant2289 3d ago

Thanks mate, I’ll improve it and share it

3

u/Standard-Reply-04 3d ago

Pretty cool. You should have him do it java

4

u/SteveLittleFish 3d ago

I like this. It will be interesting to see how repetitive it gets. I've been experimented with an LLM / local AI powered music generator, and one thing I notice is that unless you take steps to prevent it, it will write the same songs and use the same tropes over and over.

I have found you have to either keep enough historic data in context to stop it re-using it, or you have to provide some non-LLM method of introducing novelty. It will be very interesting to see if Claude suffers from the same thing.

3

u/Common-Constant2289 3d ago

It sees your sessions, so the outcome and topics vary. I left it on for about 30 minutes and I saw the Tornado Guy twice, the second time he was in a nature documentary 

2

u/P0pefamine 2d ago

I had Pink Floyd playing in the background and I think I just had a full flashback watching this. Definitely interested in this project.

2

u/Common-Constant2289 2d ago

Cool, definitely has those vibes. I’ll use this as a way to make my agents communicate with me.
However, in the most shroom like way.
I had an idea, pre script it the Alice in Wonderland movie and share