Yesterday, I attended the Czech Executive meetup in Brno, which was held in a WWII-era bunker.

As the communists had a top-secret base there, I thought creating a little old-school digital business card to share at the networking event might be fun.

I generated the code with Claude, uploaded it to GitHub pages, and programmed an NFC tag with the URL so that you can just tap it with your phone.

A hacking game in the middle "protects" the links to my website. Eat the red packet, and you're through.

Besides being fun to build, I wanted to stress-test Claude, so I increased the complexity until it keeled over.

Context limits ...

Claude Sonnet 3.5 can tackle around 500 lines of code in a single file. After that, it starts providing partial outputs.

Push it more and you'll need to split it. Here's what you can do.

Ask it to propose a structure for the application so that each individual file will not be more than a few hundred lines of code.

It will propose a file structure.

Then, ask it to generate one file at a time and migrate your code there.

Create a new Claude project and upload all the generated files using the project context feature.

This will now scale past those 600 lines, and I was able to keep working and adding complexity, including more animations and sounds.

What I learned with this experiment ...

It's incredibly quick to go from zero to 70%, but it's a struggle to go from 70% to 100%.

As complexity increases, code quality decreases. Even if you enforce a good file structure, the variables are all over the place; it does not follow good conventions unless you breathe down its neck and ask it to refactor.

Recently, I needed to import all my emails from ConvertKit to Substack. A simple script connecting both APIs was up and running in 7 minutes—I use AI for things like that all the time, and it's a fantastic time saver.

For more complex things, working with it feels like I'm breathing down the neck of a junior developer.

But I look forward to when the junior drops that title.

P.S. If you want to see the project, it's here, with slightly broken/missing CSS: https://tajpelc.github.io/blog/bunker.html​

Yours,

Taj