Building on the new /anatomy skill, I taught Claude to draw how an object evolved, using only verified patents
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Everyone knows the picture. A stooped ape on the left, a few hairier cousins in the middle, and on the right a man striding forward with a straight back. Rudolph Zallinger painted it for the Time-Life book Early Man in 1965, and it has been copied and parodied ever since, mugs included. I love it, and I now think it lies a little. Stephen Jay Gould argued that evolution is a bush with many dead branches, and that a single line of figures walking toward us tells the wrong story.
This is a story about borrowing that picture for machines. It starts with someone else’s skill, and it ends with a vacuum cleaner that lies back down on the floor.
A skill that draws machines
Recently I found a Claude skill called anatomy. You give it an idea in one line, say how a token bucket rate limiter works, and it invents a physical machine that does the job. Then it draws that machine as an isometric figure you can hover over and press. The figures are built from dozens of small parts: screws, rails, knurled knobs, a dial whose needle really moves.