Solo dev builds PNN, a 24/7 AI-run pixel-art cable news network on a Mac Studio
Icy_Upstairs_7328 · reddit · 2026-10-02
A developer with no TV background used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 to build PNN (Pixel News Network), a 24/7 pixel-art cable news network run entirely by AI from a Mac Studio in his house.
The shows
- Anchors cover real news from 70 feeds: world news, tech, sports, crypto, internet weirdness
- The AI cast remembers things, holds grudges and feuds, and occasionally storms off set
- Full TV schedule: morning show, a jailed crypto-founder parody cooking show, a correspondent stranded on Tristan da Cunha, an NFT show, a retro gaming show, and a late-night talk show Up Late with monologue, house band and guests
Music
Songs made in Suno are performed by invented bands—a southern rock band, a malfunctioning art-pop singer, a punk band—with mouth sync and drummers who wait for the drum track before playing.
The system underneath
- Claude writes every segment as structured scripts; all viewers watch one continuous shared timeline
- Anti-hallucination pipeline: prices, numbers and stats are checked against source data and rewritten or killed on mismatch; parody guests can only cite sourced research sheets, with a standards check on every line
- A research library of 15,000 sourced facts, pre-vetted by a fact-checking agent
- Cost control: Haiku handles routine dialogue, Sonnet the big shows and fact-checking; nothing is generated when nobody is watching
- 2,500 automated checks run before every deploy after one incident broke the entire live network
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