The sky is round, the Earth is square: Building a Ming horseshoe chair

ollie.md

9 points·olliewagner··4 comments

I'm the author. I made this page to show off a replica of a Ming dynasty horseshoe armchair that I made. The figures come from a 3D model fitted to photos of the chair. I'm happy to answer anything about the chair or the site.

Beautiful - the site _seems_ like an insane amount of work. Did you have any tooling to make that better?

The chairs are also an insane amount of work but hey, you get chairs!

Thanks Ken! I built it using Claude Code, with me writing, designing and art directing. It took a bit over a thousand prompts across 90 sessions to get it just how I liked it. The trick was designing evals for the things I cared about, like continuity of motion and frame rates that don't regress.

The site and the chair are awesome.

After scrolling through the site, I thought "surely he used AI to create this?". There are no tells of course, it was only the sheer amount of effort put into it that triggered the thought.

You've deployed your woodworking tools to create something no human could do with their bare hands, yet no one would dispute the chair is a work of art created by a human. To me it looks like you've used AI in the same way as those wood working tools, and with it you've created a web site that is another work of art with a human mind at its soul.

It's a master class in how to use AI to leverage creativity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com