# I gave AI a cropped UI screenshot and it just built the whole thing.

As I looked through some old files I found a 10+ year old screenshot of UI I liked. Well, part of the UI; it showed off enough as design inspiration for a personal website thing, but it wasn't the whole thing, it wasn't reproducible.

If I remember correctly, the original design was by [Dustin Curtis](https://dcurt.is). It was lifepath.me, I believe.

![A cropped screenshot of a dark, starry web page with two pill-shaped bars, and a green dot connected to a pin.](https://pocketarc.com/_rss-images/notes/2026-10-02/original-screenshot.png)
*Everything AI had to go on.*

I gave it to Claude with one instruction:

> this is part of a screenshot of some web UI. I want you to try and reproduce it _exactly_ (imagine what the whole thing might look like).

A few minutes later, I had this (live HTML below):

*[Interactive timeline: view on site]*

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that this is feasible, given everything we know about what LLMs can do. But it's incredible, absolutely remarkable, that we can just do things like this these days. I've had this screenshot for 10+ years.