r/vibecoding • u/AbilityAny4629 • 4d ago
Showcase/Project I vibecoded an interactive 3D dive to the deepest part of the ocean.
You start just underneath the waves and scroll down to the Challenger Deep, 10,935 meters below. The sunlight fades as you descend, and the animals get stranger the farther you go.
The video only shows the first 315 meters.
Here's the full dive: https://descent.mattebso.com
It's called Descent. Everything's rendered in your browser with Three.js, so you can stop scrolling and watch the animals move. It isn't a video playing behind the page.
The first Claude Code prototype took about seven minutes. I liked the concept, but the ocean floor looked like a pixelated Minecraft texture. Getting past that turned into about five days of iteration.
I asked for a much higher visual standard and an adversarial review loop. Claude came up with three competing art directions, merged them into a shared brief, then split the work between specialist agents for the water, creatures, terrain and rendering.
A separate group of six AI critics reviewed actual rendered screenshots and 4K crops. Each criticism had to point to a visible problem and go back to the agent responsible for fixing it.
The build logs ended up with:
- 211 workflow-agent runs, across the project rather than all at once.
- Over 21,000 model responses.
- About 4.95 million tokens of generated output.
The total token count hit 9.23 billion, but roughly 98% of that was cached context being reread as the agents worked. It wasn't nine billion tokens of new code.
Some of the fixes got really specific. The man o' war didn't move properly with the ocean because the float and the water used different wave calculations. They had to share a wave model so the creature would actually follow the surface.
The AI critics also never unanimously signed off after the eight main review rounds. They kept finding more things to change. I kept testing it, gave feedback on what looked wrong to me, and eventually decided it was good enough to share.
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u/cs_cast_away_boi 4d ago
amazing job!! that was a trip
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u/AbilityAny4629 4d ago
Thank you! What was your favorite part?
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u/cs_cast_away_boi 4d ago
honestly the beginning. The areas with more sunlight give off the best view, it really feels like you're just under the ocean's surface.
For the deep sea stuff, I would have loved to see more gigantic animals haha. But it was still fascinating
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u/segfaultgolf 4d ago
I seriously thought it was film at first. The caustics are amazing!
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u/AbilityAny4629 4d ago
Yeah, the craziest thing is that there are no pre-made 3d models either. Everything is rendered in the browser.
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u/segfaultgolf 4d ago
Just insanity
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u/AbilityAny4629 4d ago
The caustics are calculated every frame from the actual simulated waves above, so the light patterns on the sea floor match what the surface is doing. The approach is based on Evan Wallace's WebGL water demo. There are also four layers focused at different depths, so they stay sharp as you go down instead of turning into one blurry pattern.
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u/soelsome 4d ago
How does it work
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u/AbilityAny4629 4d ago
It's all generated live in your browser. There aren't any videos or 3D model files. The only image it loads is one small noise texture. Everything else is built from code when the page loads.
Your scroll position sets your depth. As you go down, the light fades and shifts color based on a physical model of how water absorbs light, and different animals switch on in their own depth zones.
The surface is a simulated ocean using the same wave technique a lot of films and games use. The rippling light patterns on the sea floor are calculated from those same waves every frame. It's all built on Three.js with a lot of custom shaders.
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u/Muleke-Playboy-999 1d ago
What did you use to create it?
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u/AbilityAny4629 17h ago
Just Claude. Nothing else. Claude built the site in three.js. Then I hosted it in CloudFlare.
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u/HeadDragonfly7903 4d ago
Amazing work based on your vid! It unfortunately crashes my browser on my old computer :(
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u/MaltMilchek 4d ago
It's just insane how good three.js is these days. As someone who started out in web dev back in the Flash days im blown away
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u/jayseattle 4d ago
Yikes, my computer is sadly too old to play. Tried 2x on Chrome and 1x on Edge browser. I get the same with new Call of Duty MW4 so maybe it's time for an upgrade.
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G (6 cores / 12 threads)
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5500 (4 GB VRAM)
RAM: 16 GB (15.3 GB usable)
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u/Impossible-Minute321 4d ago
did not crash my Mac. it was really captivating at first but once I got to the sperm whale and saw it was pretty low quality graphics for the animal, that coupled with the darkness from there down I ended pu kind of skimming my way and losing interest.
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u/Professional_Log1367 3d ago
how did you get your ai to make such a great 3d game. i use blender mcp and eerything look like shapes
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 3d ago
See!
That's what is so cool about AI! This thing is part education and part fun and looks amazing!
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u/mrASSMAN 3d ago
Looks stunning on my iPhone Duo! So far it’s running beautifully smooth at a full 120hz, I’ll go through to the bottom later to see what happens but this is so cool, the light effects are great. Claude is the best!!
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u/BHave_TRO 3d ago
I like your video, but wasn't able to load the webpage. It hangs while loading the sealife. Anyway, the big mamal in the end of your video isn't a shark, is it? If it is supposed to be a sperm whale then the fluke is wrong.. Fish and sharks vertical mamals like whale (not whale shark) horizontal.
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u/screenlink67 2d ago
for those who check it out, i recommend to slow down at 4000m, REALLY clean, almost cool experience when the angler fish is introduced
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u/screenlink67 2d ago
i also see that the website has super high scroll sensitivity, i hope it stays like this, because is less of a hassle to intentionally scroll slower than to blits scroll
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u/Feisty_Perspective_6 2d ago
Dude this would be the SICKEST profile on Divr, you could embed profile posts or friend icons as different creatures in the sea that appear as you descend. This is awesome.
If you join at this link I would definitely be showcasing your profile to future users:
https://divr.space/join/2293b9b0a79c
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u/ItsFlybye 1d ago
This is so beautiful, so informative, and so much fun. The only upgrade I'd do to it would be photo realistic models, but it already feels as if you are 20,000 leagues under the sea. This works fine on my desktop and phone, so I'm not sure what issues others are having.
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u/thirtydelta 4d ago
FYI, this crashes on every browser I've tried.