Goya was given a studio in 2026. He painted a crowd lit by its own phones.

Pablito is a museum of paintings that were never painted. Twenty-five painters, Bruegel to Basquiat, each handed the present day and asked to paint what they see. Vermeer's sitter is on a video call. Hopper's diner is a laundromat at three in the morning. Munch's figure on the bridge is not screaming, just not replying. https://stevemcqueenz.github.io/pablito/ The whole museum is one JSON file: a style brief per painter written in painter's language, a subject rule, five commissioned subjects each. The house rules are the interesting part. The painter's name never goes in a prompt. The subject has to postdate the painter. And when a result quotes a famous painting, the subject gets rewritten until it stops, which happened a lot. Hokusai kept painting the wave. Munch kept hanging The Scream on the wall behind his own figures until the brief said "bare walls, no other faces anywhere". For the flair: I built this, with Claude Code doing most of the work and driving everything else. It wrote the collection file and the briefs, called the image and video models itself (GPT Image 2.5 and MiniMax through Weave, one room kept on Flux via fal), reviewed the results with me, built the Astro site with arrow-key navigation between rooms, and cut the short film above from the paintings and their clips with ffmpeg. My part was refusing: about two thirds of what came back was rejected for being a pastiche or just bad, and the briefs were rewritten until the copies stopped. It's free, no sign-up, a static site on GitHub Pages; the repo is public if you want to see the collection file or the render scripts. The hardest part was not the style, it was stopping the copies. Happy to go into that if anyone's hit the same wall doing "in the manner of" honestly. Also of course the video is done by Opus 5.5 as well as the whole page.