Puppet Masters

“Who knew that copies could still be produced despite the absence of the original?” — the Laughing Man, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Stand Alone Complex names something stranger than a conspiracy: coordinated-looking action with nobody actually coordinating it, and no originator you can point to and say “it started there.” That’s a useful, slightly unsettling frame for what an agentic coding tool does when you set it loose. Simon Willison’s “Designing agentic loops” describes giving an agent a goal, a set of tools, and permission to plan, act, and check its own results across many steps without a human approving each one — the opposite of typing every line yourself, and also the opposite of a single click that does one thing. What comes out the other end is a real sequence of decisions that produced a working (or broken) result, but no one moment where you can say “I did that.” This week’s exercise puts you inside that loop directly: you’ll hand Claude Code an open-ended brief and watch it plan, build, and iterate on a public website of your own design.

Exercise: Agentic Code

Building on the experience you’ve gotten with generative code, we’re now moving to use agentic AI systems that can plan, execute, and iterate on complex coding projects with your own larger project in mind. You’ll be building more experience working with Claude Code for the web, which has full access to the files of a GitHub repository and can make changes directly — and this time, you can add content such as images and video for Claude Code to integrate. For this exercise, you can build any type of website — consider building a simple web game, educational resource, or something related to your own work.

Setting Up Your Project

The mechanics here are the same as last week — Week Ten has the full walkthrough for connecting Claude Code for the web to GitHub, including how to generate a fine-grained personal access token, so refer back to it for any step you need in detail. For this week’s project:

  1. Create a new GitHub repository at github.com for this project (a fresh one, separate from last week’s recommender)
    • Give it a descriptive name for your project
    • Make it public (required for GitHub Pages)
    • Initialize with a README if you’d like
  2. Open Claude Code for the web at claude.ai/code
    • Select your new repository from the list (this is where your personal access token from Week Ten comes in — but since that token was scoped to “Only select repositories,” you’ll need to either edit its repository list on GitHub to add this new repo, or generate a fresh fine-grained token scoped to it, following Week Ten’s steps)
    • In the big box, type /init
    • Start the project — this initializes Claude Code’s tracking and project structure (more on slash commands if you’re curious)

Building Your Public-Facing Website

Envision a public-facing website that could serve an educational purpose, function as a personal portfolio, present a humanities project, or otherwise relate to your own work. Be ambitious — the point here is not to succeed at everything you try, the goal is to better understand what agentic systems are currently capable of producing (and where they fail). Claude Code will commit changes to your repository in a separate branch, so you can always revert if the agent moves in a direction you don’t want.

Step 1: Request a Project Plan

Start by asking Claude Code to develop a project plan for your vision. Start your prompt with “Enter plan mode. Do not exit plan mode until I confirm the plan is ready. Ask clarifying questions until you understand the plan.” then follow it with your initial description. For example:

Claude Code should ask a set of questions. When you feel the project is sufficiently described, confirm the plan and let it proceed.

Step 2: Develop the Core Website

Work with Claude Code to build out your site iteratively. Use specific details, but don’t worry too much about final content — think of this as a design exercise primarily. You might try asking for specific libraries and technologies, particularly if there are things you know or are interested in — for instance, you might ask for a D3.js data visualization, or a P5.js animation. Emphasize that the site is for deployment on GitHub Pages and should stick to native web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).

Step 3: Incorporate Visual Materials

Upload images to your GitHub repository (you can do this directly on GitHub.com by navigating to your repo and clicking “Add file” > “Upload files”). Then ask Claude Code to incorporate them into your design:

Step 4: Test and Deploy

Just like in Week Ten, deploy your site using GitHub Pages:

Claude Code will typically commit its work to a branch and open a pull request rather than pushing straight to main — review the pull request on GitHub.com and merge it once you’re happy with the result. Test your site, note what works and what needs refinement, and continue iterating with Claude Code to improve it.

The design of this entire course site is an example of this type of workflow — all the content is mine, but the layouts, header animation on the main page, and interactive features were all generated using agentic AI assistance (Copilot and Claude Code).

Discussion

Share your deployed website link along with reflection on the agentic development process. How did you feel about your level of control? Where were the points of frustration? Would you make use of this for prototyping or managing digital projects in the future? Connect your experience to Meredith Martin’s “Command Lines for the Humanities” and to Willison’s account of designing agentic loops — cite at least one of our readings.

Finally, the epigraph in one question: is the site Claude Code built from your one brief a copy without an original — and does “agentic” overstate how much the system was deciding on its own?