Made by Mechanical Means

A detailed account of redesigning a personal homepage entirely through an LLM-centered cloud workflow, focused on how an assistant named Claude was used as a project manager, designer, and developer without running local code. Projects acted as an umbrella across chat, cowork and code, spawning many parallel threads where each thread ran on its own cloud machine, shared files and memory, and published private previews. Brainstorming produced dozens of directions in parallel before converging on a VHS-themed interactive room; iterations were fast (the recognizable second draft arrived 39 minutes after the first brief) and the final site emerged after roughly 60 iteration threads. The author emphasizes a phone-friendly loop: critique, click previews, and continue, with the option to attach a local GPU for heavier renders.

Technically, most 3D work was done by driving Blender as a Python library; the room is about 3,000 lines of Python that procedurally models props (examples: a 332-line VHS cassette, a 659-line 90s desk scene, a 431-line retro PC, and a 290-line room back). Lighting was baked with Blender Cycles into multiple UV atlases (separate light maps for lamps, TV, etc.) while dynamic elements remain lit live. The exterior view uses a photo plus two-channel depth maps from Depth Anything V2 for parallax and occlusion. A highlight is a CGI parody sequence: eight-shot camera-tracked reconstruction rendered as 2,787 frames (640×480 at 23.976 fps, ~116 seconds).