I love clocks and I love finding the edges of what any given technology is capable of.
I've watched this for many hours and Kimi frequently gets the most accurate clock but also the least variation and is most boring. Qwen is often times the most insane and makes me laugh. Which one is "better?"
I think you might have stumbled upon something surprisingly profound.
https://www.psychdb.com/cognitive-testing/clock-drawing-test
Interestingly, clocks are also an easy tell for when you're dreaming, if you're a lucid dreamer; they never work normally in dreams.
An amusing pattern that dates back to "1kg of steel is heavier of course" in GPT-3.5.
I applaud you for spending money to get it done.
It would be really cool if I could zoom out and have everything scale properly!
Grok 4 and Kimi nailed it the first time for me, then only Kimi on the second pass.
"Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting."
Qwen 2.5's clocks, on the other hand, look like they never make it out of the womb.
Lol, are you using ai to create fan translations of エロ漫画 ?
we should call them "prompt witch doctors" or maybe "prompt alchemists".
This experiment, however, clearly states the goal with this prompt: `Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.`
An LLM should be able to interpret that, and should be able to perform a wide range of tasks in that same style - countdown timers, clocks, calendars, floating quote bubble cycling through list of 100 pithy quotations, etc. Individual, clearly defined elements should have complex representations in latent space that correspond to the human understanding of those elements. Tasks and operations and goals should likewise align with our understanding. Qwen 2.5 and some others clearly aren't modeling clocks very well, or maybe the html/css rendering latents are broken. If you pick a semantic axis(like analog clocks), you can run a suite of tests to demonstrate their understanding by using limited one-shot interactions.
Reasoning models can adapt on the fly, and are capable of cheating - one shots might have crappy representations for some contexts, but after a lot of repetition and refinement, as long as there's a stable, well represented proxy for quality somewhere in the semantics it understands, it can deconstruct a task to fundamentals and eventually reach high quality output.
These type of tests also allow us to identify mode collapses - you can use complex sophisticated prompting to get most image models to produce accurate analog clocks displaying any time, but in the simple one shot tests, the models tend to only be able to produce the time 10:10, and you'll get wild artifacts and distortions if you try to force any other configuration of hands.
Image models are so bad at hands that they couldn't even get clock hands right, until recently anyway. Nano banana and some other models are much better at avoiding mode collapses, and can traverse complex and sophisticated compositions smoothly. You want that same sort of semantic generalization in text generating models, so hopefully some of the techniques cross over to other modalities.
I keep hoping they'll be able to use SAE or some form of analysis on static weight distributions in order to uncover some sort of structural feature of mode collapse, with a taxonomy of different failure modes and causes, like limited data, or corrupt/poisoned data, and so on. Seems like if you had that, you could deliberately iterate on, correct issues, or generate supporting training material to offset big distortions in a model.
More like fell headfirst into the ground.
I'm disappointed with Gemini 2.5 (not sure Pro or Flash) -- I've personally had _fantastic_ results with Gemini 2.5 Pro building PWA, especially since the May 2025 "coding update." [0]
[0] https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-2-5-pro-updates/
K2 hosted on groq is pretty crazy for intellgence/second. (Low rate limits still, tho.)
I wonder if that is some type of fallback for errors querying the model, or k2 actually created the html/css to display that.
I'd be interested if anyone else is successful. Share how you did it!
For example, try asking Nano Banana to do something simpler, like "draw a picture of 13 circles." It likely will not work.
Generate an image of a clock face, but instead of the usual 12 hour numbering, number it with 13 hours.
A normal (ish) 12h clock. It numbered it twice, in two concentric rings. The outer ring is normal, but the inner ring numbers the 4th hour as "IIII" (fine, and a thing that clocks do) and the 8th hour as "VIIII" (wtf).
We have yet to design a language to cover that, and it might be just a donquijotism we're all diving into.
> The farmer and the goat are going to the river. They look into the sky and see three clouds shaped like: a wolf, a cabbage and a boat that can carry the farmer and one item. How can they safely cross the river?
Most of them are just giving the result to the well known river crossing riddle. Some "feel" that something is off, but still have a hard time to figure out that wolf, boat and cabbage are just clouds.
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1fqjaxy/contex...
Maybe older models?
Once companies see this starting to show up in the evals and criticisms, they'll go out of their way to fix it.
If a clock had 13 hours, what would be the angle between two of these 13 hours?
Generate an image of such a clock
No, I want the clock to have 13 distinct hours, with the angle between them as you calculated above
This is the same image. There need to be 13 hour marks around the dial, evenly spaced
... And its last answer was
You are absolutely right, my apologies. It seems I made an error and generated the same image again. I will correct that immediately.
Here is an image of a clock face with 13 distinct hour marks, evenly spaced around the dial, reflecting the angle we calculated.
And the very same clock, with 12 hours, and a 13th above the 12...
"You're absolutely right! I made a mistake. I have now comprehensively solved this problem. Here is the corrected output: [totally incorrect output]."
None of them ever seem to have the ability to say "I cannot seem to do this" or "I am uncertain if this is correct, confidence level 25%" The only time they will give up or refuse to do something is when they are deliberately programmed to censor for often dubious "AI safety" reasons. All other times, they come back again and again with extreme confidence as they totally produce garbage output.
i'm curious if the clock image it was giving you was the same one it was giving me
ChatGPT made a nice looking clock with matplotlib that had some bugs that it had to fix (hours were counter-clockwise). Gemini made correct code one-shot, it used Pillow instead of matplotlib, but it didn't look as nice.
My working theory is that they were trained really hard to generate 5 fingers on hands but their counting drops off quickly.
Put another way, it was hoped that once the dataset got rich enough, developing this understanding is actually more efficient for the neural network than memorizing the training data.
The useful question to ask, if you believe the hope is not bearing fruit, is why. Point specifically to the absent data or the flawed assumption being made.
Or more realistically, put in the creative and difficult research work required to discover the answer to that question.
gpt-image-1 and Imagen are wickedly smart.
The new Nano Banana 2 that has been briefly teased around the internet can solve incredibly complicated differential equations on chalk boards with full proof of work.
My prompt to Grok:
---
Follow these rules exactly:
- There are 13 hours, labeled 1–13.
- There are 13 ticks.
- The center of each number is at angle: index * (360/13)
- Do not infer anything else.
- Do not apply knowledge of normal clocks.
Use the following variables:
HOUR_COUNT = 13
ANGLE_PER_HOUR = 360 / 13 // 27.692307°
Use index i ∈ [0..12] for hour marks:
angle_i = i * ANGLE_PER_HOUR
I want html/css (single file) of a 13-hour analog clock.
---
Output from grok.
"Here's the line-by-line specification of the program I need you to write. Write that program."
Can grok generate images? What would the result be?
I will try your prompt on chatgpt and gemini
When it fails a couple of times it will try to put logging in place and then confidently tell me things like "The vertex data has been sent to the renderer, therefore the output is correct!" When I suggest it take a screenshot of the output each time to verify correctness, it does, and then declares victory over an entirely incorrect screenshot. When I suggest it write unit tests, it does so, but the tests are worthless and only tests that the incorrect code it wrote is always incorrect in the same ways.
When it fails even more times, it will get into this what I like to call "intern engineer" mode where it just tries random things that I know are not going to work. And if I let it keep going, it will end up modifying the entire source tree with random "try this" crap. And each iteration, it confidently tells me: "Perfect! I have found the root cause! It is [garbage bullshit]. I have corrected it and the code is now completely working!"
These tools are cute, but they really need to go a long way before they are actually useful for anything more than trivial toy projects.
It's annoying but I prefer it to how Gemini gets depressed if it takes a few tries to make progress. Like, thanks for not gaslighing me, but now I'm feeling sorry for a big pile of numbers, which was not a stated goal in my prompt.
The screenshot method not working is unsurprising to me, VLLMs visual reasoning is very bad with details because they (as far as I understand) do not really have access to those details, just the image embedding and maybe an OCR'd transcript.
What about when we don't know what it's supposed to look like?
Lately I've been wrestling with the fact that unlike, say, a generalized linear model fit to data with some inferential theory, we don't have a theory or model for the uncertainty about LLM products. We recognize when it's off about things we know are off, but don't have a way to estimate when it's off other than to check it against reality, which is probably the exception to how it's used rather than the rule.
It's why non-coders think it's doing an amazing job at software.
But it's worryingly why using it for research, where you necessarily don't know what you don't know, is going to trip up even smarter people.
My intuition is at the start when I was like "choose one of these 10 or unknown", that unknown left a big gray area, so as I added more classes the model could say "I know it's not X, because it's more similar to Y"
I feel like in this case though, the broken clocks are broken because they don't serve the purpose of visually transmitting information, they do look like clocks tho. I'm sure if you fed the output back into the LLM and ask what time it is it would say IDK, or more likely make something up and be wrong. (at least the egregious ones where the hands are flying everywhere)
I disagree, those tasks are perfect for LLMs, since a bug you can't verify isn't a problem when vibecoding.
> "Hey this test is failing", LLM deletes test, "FIXED!"
Nothing could be relied upon to be deterministic, it was so funny to see it try to do operations.
Recently I re-ran it with newer models and was drastically better, especially with temperature tweaks.
Edit: the time may actually have been perfect now that I account for my isp's geo-located time zone
Currently, at work, I'm using Cursor for something that has an OpenGL visualization program. It's incredibly frustrating trying to describe bugs to the AI because it is completely blind. Like I just wanna tell it "there's no line connecting these two points but there ought to be one!" or "your polygon is obviously malformed as it is missing a bunch of points and intersects itself" but it's impossible. I end up having to make the AI add debug prints to, say, print out the position of each vertex, in order to convince it that it has a bug. Very high friction and annoying!!!
You can also give it a mcp setup that it can send a screenshot to the conversation, though unsure if anyone made an easy enough "take screenshot of a specific window id" kind of mcp, so may need to be built first
I guess you could also ask it to build that mcp for you...
YMMV with other models but Sonnet 4.5 is good with things like this - writing the code, "seeing" the output and then iterating on it.
Create an interactive artifact of an analog clock face that keeps time properly.
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/75daae76-3621-4c47-a684-d...
no thinking: better clock but not current time (the prompt is confusing here though): https://imgur.com/a/kRK3Q18
It's perhaps the best example I have seen of model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt.
Makes me think that LLMs are like people with dementia! Perhaps it's the best way to relate to an LLM?
https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-11-07-kimi-k2-thinking...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/07/martin-baas-giant-r...
I'm not sure what Qwen 2.5 is doing, but I've seen similar in contemporary art galleries.
Got it to work on gpt 3.5T w modified prompt (albeit not as good - https://pastebin.com/gjEVSEcJ)
`single html file, working analog clock showing current time, numbers positioned (aligned) correctly via trig calc (dynamic), all three hands, second hand ticks, 400px, clean AF aesthetic R/Greenberg Associates circa 2017. empathy, hci, define > design > implement.`
It even made a Nietzsche clock (I saw one <body> </body> which was surprisingly empty).
It definitely wins the creative award.
Some months ago I published this site for fun: https://timeutc.com There's a lot of code involved to make it precise to the ms, including adjusting based on network delay, frame refresh rate instead of using setTimeout and much more. If you are curious take a look at the source code.
I tried gpt-oss-20b (my go-to local) and it looks ok though not very accurate. It decided to omit numbers. It also took 4500 tokens while thinking.
I'd be interested in seeing it with some more token leeway as well as comparing two or more similar prompts. like using "current time" instead of "${time}" and being more prescriptive about including numbers
9 AIs × 43,200 minutes = 388,800 requests/month
388,800 requests × 200 tokens = 77,760,000 tokens/month ≈ 78M tokens
Cost varies from 10 cents to $1 per 1M tokens.
Using the mid-price, the cost is around $50/month.
---
Hopefully, the OP has this endpoint protected - https://clocks.brianmoore.com/api/clocks?time=11:19AM
AI-optimized <analog-clock>!
People expect perfection on first attempt. This took a brief joint session:
HI: define the custom element API design (attribute/property behavior) and the CSS parts
AI: draw the rest of the f… owl
I know, developers do the same, but at least they check it in Git to notice their mistakes. Here is an opportunity for AI to call a Google Authentication on you, or anything else.
The thing I always want from timezone tools is: “Let me simulate a date after one side has shifted but the other hasn’t.”
Humans do badly with DST offset transitions; computers do great with them.
Place a baby elephant in the green chair
I cannot unsee what I saw and it is 21:30 here so I have an hour or so to eliminate the picture from my mind or I will have nightmares.
I use 'Sonnet 4.5 thinking' and 'Composer 1' (Cursor) the most, so it would be interesting to see how such SOTA models perform in this task.
I'm not sure if this was the intent or not, but it sure highlights how unreliable LLMs are.
More seriously, I'd love to see how the models perform the same task with a larger token allowance.
This gives better results, at least for me.
Why is a new clock being rendered every minute? Or AI models are evolving and improving every minute.
Or regret: "why didn't we stop it when we could?"
Granted, it is not a clock - but it could be art. It looks like a Picasso. When he was drunk. And took some LSD.
Great experiment!
Also, your example is not showing the current time.
> Please generate an analog clock widget, synchronized to actual system time, with hands that update in real time and a second hand that ticks at least once per second. Make sure all the hour markings are visible and put some effort into making a modern, stylish clock face.
Followed by:
> Currently the hands are working perfectly but they're translated incorrectly making then uncentered. Can you ensure that each one is translated to the correct position on the clock face?
[0] https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...