Solo designer ships Night Atlas, a walkable universe with 70k lines of code built on Claude Code

Sarntinel · reddit · 2026-09-20

Reddit user Sarntinel launched Night Atlas, an interactive universe where user-submitted astrophotography and Earth-based timelapses are pinned to their real celestial locations, with support for VR, desktop, and mobile.

Scale: 70,000 lines of JavaScript/PHP, about 6 weeks of focused work (5 months including prior work), built entirely with Claude Code—Opus for the hard parts, Sonnet for the rest.
Visitors: photos and videos placed in their true position in the sky (double-click to immerse), voice stories from photographers with pinned notes, Earth timelapses on a globe at their capture spots, Sun/Moon/planets at tonight's real positions, a space station with holodeck and Star Cab game, an .mp4 flythrough recorder, and free local astro-editing tools.
Photographers: accounts, gallery builder, astro catalogue for placement, voice stories, background music, live editing without losing likes.
Admin: roles, review queues, trust levels, reporting workflows, alerts, and a no-code operations panel; the universe lights up automatically as media is approved, no deploys needed.

His Claude workflow advice: describe goals very clearly, use the strongest model for hard tasks and have it write instructions so weaker models can finish the rest.

Original post →

Solo designer ships Night Atlas, a walkable universe with 70k lines of code built on Claude Code

More from coding & agent