Nate Herk(@nateherk):I just gave Claude Code a hideous coffee shop website and told it to make it better 100 times in a row. I ran it twice, once with Sonnet 5.5 and once with Opus 5.5, both on medium. Every round was a fresh session with no skills, CLAUDE.md, plugins, or memory. The prompt was the same every time: look at the site, innovate, make one bold change, use any tool you have, and ship something every round. What happened: - Sonnet played it safe and spent 100 rounds making small tweaks to the ordering flow. It finished in under 2 hours for about $22 in API value. - Opus kept inventing (voice ordering, a chat assistant, a pumpkin you can carve, a Spanish version) until the site hit 21,000 lines and started breaking its own features. It took 8.5 hours and about $137. - Neither model searched the web once in 200 rounds, even though the tool was right there. If you want AI to go find inspiration, you have to ask it to.

2026.10.30 00:27

I just gave Claude Code a hideous coffee shop website and told it to make it better 100 times in a row. I ran it twice, once with Sonnet 5.5 and once with Opus 5.5, both on medium. Every round was a fresh session with no skills, CLAUDE.md, plugins, or memory. The prompt was the same every time: look at the site, innovate, make one bold change, use any tool you have, and ship something every round. What happened: - Sonnet played it safe and spent 100 rounds making small tweaks to the ordering flow. It finished in under 2 hours for about $22 in API value. - Opus kept inventing (voice ordering, a chat assistant, a pumpkin you can carve, a Spanish version) until the site hit 21,000 lines and started breaking its own features. It took 8.5 hours and about $137. - Neither model searched the web once in 200 rounds, even though the tool was right there. If you want AI to go find inspiration, you have to ask it to.