I Tried and Failed to Rebuild the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude

Summary

Can Claude Recreate the 1996 Space Jam Website? No. Or at least not with my prompting skills. Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree. Please please please help 😞 Final note: I use "he" to refer to Claude, which Josh finds ridiculous. Space Jam, 1996 For those who don't know, Warner Bros keeps this anachronistic website online that was released in 1996 to accompany the Space Jam movie. It's a classic example of early web era design. Simple, colorful, and sparks joy. We're going to find out if we can get Claude to recreate it using only a screenshot. Set Up At a minimum, I'm providing Claude: a screenshot of the website all of the assets the website uses To track Claude's inner monologue and actual API calls, I set up a man-in-the-middle proxy to capture the full conversation between Claude Code and Anthropic's API. This logs everything: user prompts, Claude's responses, tool invocations (Read, Write, Bash commands), etc. Each attempt generates a traffic.log file with the raw API traffic, which I then parse for easier analysis. Part 1: Claude the Realist The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background. The entire page uses absolute positioning with pixel specific left/top values. The total payload is under 200KB. Given that Claude has all of the assets + screenshots of the website, I assume this should be relatively boring. He'll nail it, and we'll move on to something much more. A mildly cute example of agentic HTML generation… I tell Claude: Copycopy code to clipboardI am giving you: 1. A full screenshot of the Space Jam 1996 landing page.2. A directory of raw image assets** extracted from the original site Your job is to recreate the landing page as faithfully as possible, matching the screenshot...