Aspirational Clownmaxxing and Joey's cadillac todo list

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.