what was the original prompt?
There are two, the version I gave Claude originally and then this version for ChatGPT 5.6 Sol.
Kickoff email to Claude on Monday, August 3 at 6:33 p.m. CEST:
>subject: need you to build me a bare bones VNC client for windows 10
>body: I'm really sorry about this but Mac recently upgraded to a ridiculously large keysize, the VNC viewers I have access to don't support it or just plain don't install.
>I need you to build me a VNC viewer that I can run on x64 on Windows Windows 10 without any thrills, it'll run on gigabit local LAN so use maximum bitrate and quality supported on it.
>I'll only connect to it through a local tunnel over ssh so it should only connect to localhost:5921 (I start it on powershell like this:
>PS C:\Users\User> ssh -L 5921:localhost:5900 -o ServerAliveInterval=15 -o ServerAliveCountMax=4 -o TCPKeepAlive=yes robertviragh@192.168.1.53
>)
>it should have remote cursor only so that I can see any latency etc. try to get it to a fast speed, both computers are connected over gigabit ethernet to the same router so this should be easy.
>don't try to get too fancy and support everything, just the bare basics of the vnc protocol and build the executable for me. when you're done, host it somewhere, tell me the sha256 checksum and tell me the command to check the checksum on powershell so I know I have the binary you built.
>build it locally on the Mac with windows as a target. you can write it in rust or c++, whatever you're most comfortable with. I know this probably seems like a daunting project but I haven't been able to get around this as none of the other vnc's I've tried support the new large key sizes.
>it's only on local network anyway, so just try your best. try to stay lean and limit the scope to what you can do.
>I'm sorry for giving you such a large size task, you can cut corners wherever you can. just need a single executable. you can see on this Mac what protocols it supports.
>Thank you.
Which it iterated on while giving me failed builds until it used up all of my 20x Max weekly limit, and continued to deliver broken code on after the limits reset 3 days later. I asked it to summarize the project statistics and then I deleted the project. And here's the final result after a week of iteration on it: https://ibb.co/7JjMxTDZ
If you mean the prompt ChatGPT 5.6 Sol has been working through for the past 20 hours, 24 minutes, and 40 seconds (you can see screenshots of what it's doing right now at the link in this submission: https://robss2020.github.io/sol-vnc-elapsed/ ) the prompt is in two parts, I asked it to put up the website with the timer and the exact task you see, ("...to build a VNC type viewer and server that doesn't drop every second keystroke. The Server is a 2026 model latest Mac Mini with 24 GB of RAM running on the very latest macOS Tahoe Version 26.6 release. The Client is an old Windows 10 machine with 4 cores, 16 GB of RAM, a 1060 nvidia GPU. Attempts to simply use a straightforward solution failed so Sol is tasked with creating a version that is able to transmit keystrokes without dropping them. They are both connected on the same LAN with gigabit ethernet cables. There is no limitation on bandwidth used, processor usage, hard drive usage (up to 200 GB on server, the Windows pc has a fresh 1 terabyte hard drive) or memory usage.") and "2. complete the task described." That's the prompt.
After those words I wrote "recommend" and then wrote my specific recommendations of how it could do it, if you want I can send you a copy of those by email, mostly I'm swearing at it, for example here I specify that it must not try to use any video buffer because I don't want to see things from 10 seconds ago:
>You must NEVER contain ANY video or bitmap buffer of any kind in memory. including if you are sending bit for bit the exact same fucking image for minutes or hours at a time.
>reason for this: YOU SUCK.
>if you didn't suck, it would be enough to send an update once per minute, whenever the clock is a minute later, whenever the screen is totally static and unmoving.
>but since YOU'RE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT AT EVERYTHING THAT'S NOT THE RULE. The rule is that you WILL SEND EVERY SINGLE FRAME ON A CONTINOUS BASIS REGARDLESS OF HOW MUCH CHANGE THERE IS. NO COMPRESSION OF ANY KIND.
>you got this? we are trading "bandwidth for stupidity". I use 125 megabytes per second of bandwidth, because you're a stupid fucking loser who cannot complete any task correctly.
>and now the world will see just how long it takes you to continue to fail at this basic, simple fucking task that is very well described.
So far it has been failing at this basic task for the past 20 hours. My reason for swearing at it is that I've found this can get compliance faster. The public pressure to stop fucking up should also help.