Stratechery Universe

Alex Albert had a great challenge on X; with the launch of Claude Sonnet 4.5, who could build the coolest thing with Sonnet 4.5 in just a few days.

What I built: An interactive 3D visualization that maps 13 years of Stratechery articles as a explorable galaxy. Each article is a star - sized by influence (PageRank), colored by topic, positioned by relationships. Click any article to explore its connections across Ben Thompson’s intellectual universe.

Live demo: stratecheryuniverse.zacharynielsen.com

Built in: 3 days with Claude Sonnet 4.5 (which wrote ~90% of the code)

Here’s how it happened:

Initial Brainstorming

I’m a huge fan of the Stratechery blog by Ben Thompson, and after a prolific 13 years of writing, I wanted to know if there was a fun way to visualize all of his posts and links together.

By the Numbers

1,738 articles scraped spanning 13 years (2013-2025)
3,353 internal links mapped between articles
3 days from idea to deployed site
Most influential article: “Aggregation Theory” (PageRank: 27.5)
7 topic clusters discovered via NLP
Claude wrote ~90%+ of the code

The Build Process

I first got started in the Claude Web App, sketching out just a quick project-plan.md file. As an opening, my first note was a random off-the-cuff ramble:

I’d like to make some sort of thing to better visualize Ben Thompson’s website, specifically https://stratechery.com. Can you help me put a project plan and readme? Ask questions. I’m thinking scrape the site, and categorize a post into free and paid. For the free posts, do some super cool visualization, filtering, etc. Super open to ideas here. And then for paid, I don’t have a key so we can just collect those off to the side.

After asking a few process questions (what tools am I most familiar with, where do I want to host, etc.) I let the project know that this is for a sonnet 4.5 build contest, Sonnet got super excited

Oh wow, this is for the Anthropic contest! That changes everything - let’s make this spectacular. This needs to be technically impressive AND visually stunning. I’m thinking we go for the “Keep Researching” award - exploring Ben Thompson’s intellectual universe. Project Vision: “Stratechery Universe” A living, interactive map of Ben Thompson’s mind - showing not just what he writes about, but how ideas connect, evolve, and reference each other over time. The “Absolutely Crazy and Cool” Ideas

3D Knowledge Graph: Interactive 3D network where nodes are articles, sized by internal links, colored by topic, positioned by time. Click to explore, rotate to see different eras. Think brain synapses firing….

From there, we finalized a project plan, and Web Claude actually made a first round of typescript files! I pasted those along with the project plan into a directory and swapped over to Claude Code.

Claude Code

I find Claude Code great for these middle bits of diagnosing errors, fixing them in real time, and then rerunning the application. One area I got into a bit of a death loop was that I saw the code being edited, but the site itself wasn’t working. That was due to a typescript bug - during a refactor, it kept a main app.tsx in the main directory, but created a /frontend where it did a majority of the changes.

Another point of confusion was that I wanted Tailwind style visuals. Claude Code worked and worked, but I wasn’t seeing them on the site. Turns out I had never installed Tailwind in this directory and activated it. First time front end dev mistakes for sure!

Analysis

Where Sonnet 4.5 worked wonders was the scraping and data analysis. It’s so useful to point Sonnet 4.5 to a site, grab bits of HTML that signify the next page, and it knows enough to move to the next page. We ended up getting ~1700 articles out of that which is good enough for me! Sonnet also crushed the PageRank algorithm. If I was using this for something serious I’d want to check the numbers closely, but for this the first pass was more than good enough.

The Visualization Evolution

The data was ready, but how to show it? We went through several iterations:

Attempt 1: Basic 3D Network Graph Standard nodes-and-edges. It worked, but I thought we could make it even flashier

Attempt 2: Galaxy Universe Claude suggested treating articles like stars in a galaxy:

Size = influence (PageRank score)
Color = topic cluster
Position = temporal relationships
Glowing effects and bloom shaders for that cosmic feel

This looked stunning! I continued to make some small tweaks, but was pretty happy with this out of the gate.

Attempt 3: Transit Map One other visualization type to mix it up:

Each topic = a transit line
Articles = stations along that line
Chronological progression along each line
Transfer stations = articles spanning multiple topics

I kept it in for reference sake; it’s a bit laggy (a TON of data with the variable station labels) and I don’t know if the visual is perfect, but it’s super fun and I think a great example of what’s possible in a short amount of time with Sonnet 4.5.