Built this tonight with Claude Code’s new mods (the function-hooks plugin API). It’s a little CRT TV with rabbit ears that floats on my desktop, always on top, and airs whatever the “director” feels like. The director is a Sonnet 5.5 call at low effort with one instruction: you have total creative control, nobody approves your pitches. What it does Every segment is written from scratch: commercials, courtroom dramas, nature docs, a telenovela between sentient furniture. The director picks the channel, the format, the cast, each character’s voice, the pixel art, the camera effects and the news ticker. He keeps a private memo between segments, and between sessions, so running gags and story arcs carry over. On his first night he invented a tornado judge on a blimp (“JUDGE GUST: BLIMP COURT”) and wrote in his own notes that the appeal would be heard by a bigger tornado. He also gets a raw feed of what I’m doing in the terminal. When I complained the TV was taking too much screen space, he aired “EMERGENCY: FILL THE SPACE”, then “CORNER V. SHAREHOLDERS”, then a commercial where a guy named Sven bills me $300 for the lasagna that now lives in my corner. Ghost lighthouse keeper included. Characters actually talk. Each one gets a Windows SAPI voice with its own pitch and speed, and the captions wait for the line to finish. Sound effects (sad trombone, laugh track, air horn, static, stand-by muzak) are synthesized in code, no audio files. How it works The director never draws pixels. He writes each scene as JSON shapes on a 100x75 canvas (circles, polygons, blocky text, a swirling portal, fire, rain) with animation tags like bob , blink and talk . A talk mouth only opens while that character is speaking. A rasterizer in the mod draws the scene at 128x96, 10 fps, with CRT effects: scanlines, vignette, VHS chroma bleed, glitch tears, static between channels, and the power-off collapse to a dot. The first version rendered inside the terminal with half-block characters (each cell is 2 pixels, foreground and background truecolor). It looked great but ate screen space, so now the frames go to a borderless always-on-top window, a small C# WinForms window started from PowerShell. Drag it anywhere, the mouse wheel resizes it, the knobs work. He writes the next segment while the current one airs, so there’s almost never dead air. When there is, you get color bars and PLEASE STAND BY. Cost Measured from the log over 13 segments: About 4.1k input tokens per segment, 3.0k of them served from the prompt cache About 1.7k output tokens per segment About 12 seconds to write each segment About $0.02 per segment and 70 segments an hour, so roughly $1.40 per hour of TV at API prices. Output is 86% of that; caching cut the input cost by about two thirds. 48 segments so far, about $0.95 total. A sleep timer turns it off after 45 minutes with no activity. https://reddit.com/link/1x0c65v/video/nck6qjkvy4uh1/player submitted by /u/Common-Constant2289
Originally posted by u/Common-Constant2289 on r/ClaudeCode