A desert-island screensaver · 17 scenes
Norman is out of office. Claude is helping.
Norman, an accountant, has been stranded for 1,274 days and still wears the tie. His assistant is small, orange and relentlessly helpful. Leave it running, or pick a scene from the list.
--/17Opening titles
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Opening titles
Norman waves at nobody. Claude offers to help.
Keyboard
← →previous / nextPpauseLloop sceneNday / nightFscreensaver mode1… 3 speed
About
Three prompts, one island, no image files.
This page came out of a single conversation with Claude in Claude Code. The first prompt asked for an HTML file with animations in the style of the castaway screensaver that ran on Windows PCs in the nineties.
Claude kept the format (tiny island, one palm, a lonely man, gags picked at random) but did not copy the original character. It invented Norman instead: an accountant with a tie, a briefcase and an out-of-office sign.
The second prompt swapped Norman's crab for the Claude mascot and asked for every gag to be about Claude and Anthropic. That is where the Golden Gate sandcastle, the tungsten cube delivery, the prompt-injecting shark and the usage-limit laptop come from.
“Goodnight! I won't remember any of this.”
The third prompt was: deploy it, add controls, and put the numbers on the page. They are on the right, read from the session transcript when this page was built.
Everything on the stage is drawn by code on a 320 × 180 canvas, one rectangle at a time: roughly 1,200 of them in a typical frame. There are no sprites, no image files and no libraries, and the lettering is a 3 × 5 pixel font typed in as ones and zeros. Each scene is a short script that tells Norman and Claude where to walk and what to say.
The conversation
- Prompts typed
- 3
- First prompt to this build
- 56 min
- Claude workingthe rest was waiting for the next prompt
- 51 min
- Model calls
- 54
- Tool calls45 shell, 20 file reads, 4 file writes, 9 other
- 78
Tokens
- Written by Claude115,220 of them thinking, never shown
- 225,903
- Read back from cachethe whole conversation is re-read on every call
- 12.2M
- Written to cache
- 549,456
- Fresh, uncached input
- 118
Cost at API list price
- Output at $40 per million
- $9.04
- Cache writes at $10 per million
- $5.49
- Cache reads at $0.20 per million
- $2.43
- Estimated total
- $16.97
What came out
- Scenes
- 17
- This pageone HTML file, engine included
- 1,836 lines · 98 KB
- Model
- Claude Fable 5.2
Snapshot taken 9 November 2026 at 21:32 UTC, a moment before deploying, so the last few minutes of the conversation are not counted. The cost is an estimate from public per-token prices for Claude Fable 5.2; a subscription would bill differently.