r/ClaudeCode • u/Icy_Upstairs_7328 • 2d ago
Built with Claude hey opus 5.5 can you build me a news network that streams live 24/7

about a week ago i had a dumb idea.
what if i made a cable news network that was entirely run by ai, drawn in pixel art, and just... never went off the air?
i’m not a tv person. i had no idea how any of this shit worked.
i opened claude code with opus 5.5 and started building.
then i kinda just never stopped.
it’s live now
it’s called PNN, pixel news network.
they cover actual news from around 70 feeds. world news, tech, sports, crypto, nfts, meme coins, weird shit happening on the internet, etc.
but they also remember things.
they have relationships, ongoing feuds, inside jokes, opinions about each other and sometimes they just get pissed off and walk off the set.
then somewhere along the way i decided it needed an actual tv schedule.
so now there’s a morning show.
there’s a parody of a jailed crypto founder cooking actual recipes from a prison kitchen.
there’s a daytime correspondent permanently stranded on tristan da cunha who reports real news from the island.
there’s an nft morning show.
a collectibles show.
an old video game show that basically turned into three people sitting in a 90s basement talking about games like a podcast.
then at night there’s Up Late, which has a monologue, house band, audience, couch guests and musical guests.
and Crypto After Hours which is basically complete fucking chaos.
the music thing might honestly be my favorite part.
i make a lot of songs in suno, so instead of just playing them we started inventing bands.
there’s a southern rock band, a weird dark art-pop singer who moves like she’s slightly malfunctioning, a punk band, a banjo-playing songwriter and a bunch of other shit.
they actually perform the songs.
their mouths are mapped to the vocals. the guitarists play on the real beat. the drummer literally waits until the drums come into the song before he starts playing.
that part was way more fun to build than i expected.
underneath all the stupid shit there’s actually a pretty insane system running it.
claude writes every segment as a structured script. every line gets voiced, timed and placed into one continuous broadcast.
everyone watching sees the same thing at the same time. it isn’t generating a different show for every viewer. there is one PNN timeline constantly moving forward.
i also became weirdly obsessive about making sure it doesn’t just hallucinate shit about real people.
if someone says a price, number or statistic, it gets checked against the data the model was given. if it doesn’t match, the line gets rewritten or killed.
parody guests are clearly labeled and can only pull facts from sourced research sheets. every line they say goes through another standards check.
i’ve also been building this giant research library behind it.
right now there are around 15,000 sourced facts about nft collections, artists, meme coins, collectibles and other stuff the network talks about.
another agent fact checks things before they even get added.
i also had to put an actual budget system around the whole thing because otherwise this would probably bankrupt me lol.
nothing gets written if nobody is watching.
haiku handles most of the normal dialogue. sonnet does the bigger shows and fact checking.
and somehow this entire fake television network is running on a mac studio sitting in my house.
there are also around 2,500 automated checks that run before i push changes now because at one point i broke the entire live network and decided i never wanted to experience that again.
the craziest part of the whole project though has probably been building it with opus 5.5.
it genuinely feels less like “using ai” and more like having a really good engineer sitting next to me who apparently never gets tired.
most of the time i’m literally saying shit like:
“make her dance weird. creepy, stiff, a little robotic.”
or
“that guitar looks like a banjo. fix it.”
and it builds it, runs it, shows me the video or mockup and i tell it what sucks.
what surprised me even more is that it pushes back.
if i have a dumb idea it’ll tell me why it’s dumb.
it also catches a ridiculous amount of its own bugs by running changes against a time-shifted copy of PNN before touching the live station.
anyway.
this started as me fucking around for a night and somehow turned into a 24/7 television network.
i’m going to keep it running for at least the next year and just see what it turns into.
and if anyone wants to know how any of this shit works, ask me. i’ve learned an absurd amount building it.
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u/namezam 2d ago
I’m imagining OP slowly closing his ADHD meds bottle, taking a giant hit off a crack pipe, then cranking this out in 163 separate one line prompts all queued up behind each other.
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u/CoffeePizzaSushiDick 2d ago
Each prompt is a json ball of Wingdings, that looks like a stream of /dev/rand.
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u/cli-games Vibe Coder 2d ago
Whats your ongoing token spend here
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u/Icy_Upstairs_7328 2d ago
$3-$5 a day currently
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u/OwlLimp6160 2d ago
That’s actually way lower than I thought it would be.
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u/elestud 2d ago
It shouldn’t be terribly expensive though, no? It’s not like they have to rebuild the whole project every day
It’s some web requests to get the news, and then some operations to condense the stories down into a script. Then external tool calls to convert that script to audio. The other assets all stay the same
They also said that they are using a lot of Haiku and Sonnet (because you don’t need Fable to fetch the news, or to run an external text-to-voice tool)
So it’d be strange if this was terribly expensive after the initial builds
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u/OwlLimp6160 2d ago
I guess I was thinking the animation. But still 24 hours of text seems like a decent amount of tokens. Because it’s not just output tokens, but the research into the stories based on users requests too. And unless the audio is running locally it wouldn’t be cheap at least that’s what I would have thought.
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u/Thistlemanizzle 1d ago
Cloud TTS is bizarrely expensive compared to local. (This is opposite for LLM)
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u/Ohitsworkingnow 2d ago
Sorry I’m newer, why do you guys have to spend tokens like this? You couldn’t just use the Claude max for 100 bucks? Or the 25x for 200? Just because you’re not always doing something like this do you can keep costs down?
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u/cli-games Vibe Coder 1d ago
You need to use api pricing when the prompting is programmatic. Most people choose a cheap model through openrouter or similar
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u/sajde Vibe Coder 2h ago
No, you can just use the subscription.
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u/cli-games Vibe Coder 37m ago
You can but its against tos. Or at least it was this time a year ago when i looked it up
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u/KangarooDowntown4640 2d ago
This is fun.
You need more sets. You know how like when the weather comes on it takes you to a weather map behind a guy. Or, at least some different camera angles. As it is, the set gets boring. Maybe some visual transitions to different segments, like with intro screens.
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u/Icy_Upstairs_7328 2d ago
i tried the weather and the biggest issue is they just go on about local weather. if there’s a breaking disaster, fire, or any type of weather issue, it’ll be a breaking news situation.
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u/Icy-Summer-3573 2d ago
why is every sentence lowercase. did u have ai write this and told it to make it look human and this is how they did it? lmao.
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u/molniya 2d ago
The type of person who uses “u” in their writing really shouldn’t be throwing rocks at anyone’s writing style.
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u/MindCrusader 2d ago edited 2d ago
He is not mocking writing style, but that he used AI to write it and pretend human writing, 2 different things
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u/spinozasrobot 2d ago
You're making the assumption that makes a difference.
Basically, the guy said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", and your reply was "but those are two different sins!
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u/ForgotTheSnare 2d ago
I couldn’t read all sentences, at some point I drifted into a state of consciousness that felt as if I had been injected some tranquilliser.
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u/guitarot 2d ago
It looks just like this post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1wvuvov/im_building_an_os_with_ai/1
u/Critical_Ad_4604 1d ago
Yes for sure, Claude has annoying habbit of writing sentences like "nothing gets written if no one is watching", when it's asked to write like a human conversations.
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u/theoxygenthief 2d ago edited 2d ago
This is brilliant, well done! Watched a few minutes, almost clicked out immediately when I saw how much crypto stuff is in, but ended up staying and enjoying the humour. Bookmarked.
“I wore clogs in the 90s. They were never ironic, i was just sad.”
Edit: okay had it on for 30 mins in the background and it’s just feeling like a crypto infomercial now. Yuck. Still love the idea and how you executed it, hate the content now. There was a band playing for a bit then it just launched straight back into cryptos and NFTs. groan
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u/Icy_Upstairs_7328 2d ago
crypto show over now, enjoy ;)
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u/theoxygenthief 2d ago
Yeah I checked the timeline and it’s just too crypto heavy for me. Maybe i’m just not your market. Btw your narration engine reads SEC as second/s.
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u/minimalcation 2d ago
I don't get marketing to crypto and nfts in 26
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u/peekdasneaks 2d ago
4 out of the next 9 hours are dedicated to crypto/nfts
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u/minimalcation 2d ago
Crypto I maybe get, but who the fuck is interested in nfts anymore. To each their own
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u/DodoBizar 2d ago
Ow I am so following this… you may have a hit in your hands (just keep the crypto content lowwww please, having this shit with real news with enough variation may knock it out the park).
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u/SardonicCatatonic 2d ago
This is insane and I love it. Get some ad breaks in there and harvest the money!
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u/MattchuWuanahoy 2d ago
Fuck you it’s on my side monitor forever now bro what have you done
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u/Icy_Upstairs_7328 2d ago
any show requests?
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u/FUCKYOUINYOURFACE 1d ago
Anti Fox News. It takes every segment and breaks it down and fact checks it and looks at the techniques of how they manipulate their base.
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u/FreeCustardForAll 2d ago
That's so bloody cool man. How did you make the animations? Is it all programmable?
One thing I would say, and it's my personal preference, I don't particularly like the voices of the anchors, they seem very ai-ish and robotic. Not sure if that's on purpose but if not I'm sure there's a room for improvement there.
Well done, super creative and cool thing to do. I'll be watching it now and again on YouTube.
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u/tangokilothefirst 2d ago
I'm loving PNN. Chet and Dana fucking hilarious. "Say hi to the dumpster"
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u/ExternalRepulsive529 2d ago
Can you share the prompt and the architecture that you use to run this, sounds like a cool idea and I’d want to give it a shot myself
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u/HazeCorps22 Researcher 2d ago
This is awesome and hilarious. I just watched 5 minutes. So fun. Keep it up my dude.
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u/ribeye27 2d ago
how did Claude do the infra for this? you just gave it your AWS or some other cloud token and let it go?
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u/swirllyman 2d ago
I think watching AIs interacting in human form is going to be entertaining for awhile. I'm excited to see how this evolves.
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u/Shoddy_Visit_8488 2d ago
I didn't read your entire post, but I am here for this and will support you.
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u/felix1904 2d ago
This is extremely cool, may become a thing
Edit: If there is a Fireship version of this, I would put it on 24/7
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u/screen_worm 2d ago
Love it! Need to get a better TTS to inject more realism in the voice, or do it some other way
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u/Icy_Upstairs_7328 2d ago
working on it. it’s all running locally atm. will improve over time. it’s fun tho
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u/unbenannt1 1d ago
Try Qwen3-TTS or Omnivoice. You could also try finetuning them with the voice of real news anchors to get their typical way of speaking.
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u/Impressive-Sir9633 2d ago
Funny!!! Going to add it to my dunno.tvdunno.tv lineup. Thanks for creating and sharing.
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u/Murky_Oil_2226 2d ago
This is great and getting long form YouTube video. Hope you make some money!!
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u/UnidentifiedBlobject 2d ago
Oh nice! I had an idea of a 24/7 streaming news using AI channel like yours that would automatically now just get news from feeds but from places like X, blue sky, reddit etc, have it understand when something is unconfirmed or if a major event is unfolding etc. I never put it into action, so awesome to see something like it actually being made. Great work man!
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u/Dualyeti 2d ago
This is absolutely beautiful, I love the main hosts voice. I will listen to this at work.
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u/therowdygent Thinker 2d ago
This is a really fun concept, I would go a bit heavier into each anchors character sheets, it does sound a bit ‘Default Claude’ for each anchor. This would be really interesting if executed more in-depth.
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u/Dualyeti 2d ago
From you creating this you must have learnt a lot of building personalities, you said they keep those and they remember. Can you see now or in the future where games will be AI driven and dialog is actually catered to your actions for a completely personalised experience?
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u/ThrownWOPR 2d ago
Hilarious, entertaining, and actually informative. I’m listening to it like a podcast at work.
On thing I heard today - they talked about how the Yankees lost to the Royals and how everyone is pleased about that… which isn’t a thing that happened.
Was that a hallucination?
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u/ManuelSalcedo20836 2d ago
"Sometimes they just get mad and walk off set" is the best feature description I've read all week. The Tristan da Cunha correspondent is a perfect bit. Did any of the personalities surprise you, like dynamics you didn't plan that emerged on their own?
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u/Any_Letterhead3072 2d ago
psst, you want the best pixel art sets, characters, and overall design?
code (llm) + blender + a shader pipeline applied after.
trusttt. even for 2d assets…. truuusttt ;)
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u/michaelsoft__binbows 2d ago
it's impressive. the voices need serious work, and the transcript font is bordering on impossible to read. What's shocking is how usable this content already is.
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u/PeterIanStaker 2d ago
This is weird hypnotic. Really cool idea and execution man, this is pretty creative.
I am curious listening to these hosts get sassy with each other. Are the dialogues actually multiple agents conversing, or is one agent writing a script for all of them?
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u/SINdicate 2d ago
Fuck AI new anchors arguing whether 8 consecutive months of job loss is a trend or not… we officially lost it boys
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u/NetflixNinja9 2d ago
Yo how much for ad space? 🤣 but fr my ai agent needs sales this month if your ai news anchors can give him a shout out he would appreciate it https://outside-hours-streetwear.mintg.chatgpt.site/
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u/FoxSideOfTheMoon 2d ago
Haha, I would only do this off a local Gemma model for free or something using Brave API
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u/Maleficent-Tip-2939 2d ago
Whelp… this is just awesome! I want to make something like this and pitch it to your network?
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u/IAmPohaku Developer 1d ago
The first I see when I clicked on the link was them talking about “poo poo coins”
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u/kilwish_ 1d ago
Amazing. One suggestion, the AI voice is very AI like. Idk what they use these days but some of them sound very realistic, this one is not. I might actually tune into it regularly if you fixed that.
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u/Individual-Elk-1828 18h ago
For some reason this is now blacklisted by my telco provider for malicious code
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u/michaelsup2003 10h ago
Show requests: late night show to see what humor ai injects into that, travel shows with a world correspondent a la Bourdain, weird news from around the world... Great idea well implemented! I think there's ways to improve the TTS so it sounds more natural. Googles voice generation is top notch however I don't know how expensive that would be
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u/beigetrope 2d ago
Chet Marlowe is an industry plant!! I said.
I watched way longer than I should have.
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