Teardown is an MIT-licensed GitHub project that provides a Claude Code skill for producing an offline, one-page HTML simulator from a plain-language request about a machine. For developers building technical demos or explainers, the relevant constraint is that the project aims to put the interactive model, surrounding numeric panels, a control that opens the active part, and an unattended tour into that same page. The project README describes this as a simulator that can be taken apart.
A constrained output format
The repository’s suggested installation command is npx skills add elvarofficial/teardown -g -a claude-code. It then calls for npm install and npx playwright install chromium in the installed directory, with Node.js 20 or newer required. The README lists ffmpeg as an extra dependency for video output and Python 3 for sound. The project README documents those prerequisites.
Its example prompts cover a four-stroke motorcycle engine, a mechanical watch and a hydraulic excavator arm. The repository also contains three complete example machines: a V8, a Cessna and a Strandbeest. The project README identifies those examples and prompts.
The project separates a machine definition from its interactive and recorded forms: the -shared variant is the machine, -live is the page a user drives, and -film is the recorded tour. Its build.mjs script bundles a machine into a single HTML file with three.js and fonts inlined. The project README describes that layout and build step.
More than a browser demo
Teardown also includes a capture path. Its capture.mjs tool renders a film frame by frame to a 60 fps MP4 or emits review sheets of still images; the repository’s sound tooling generates procedural audio on the film timeline. The project README lists those capture and sound components. The project credits whaleyxbt/claude-motion for the runtime, frame capture, sound engine and review rules. The project README names that upstream dependency.
The unresolved question is fidelity
Analysis: Teardown is most clearly a packaging and presentation workflow, rather than evidence of a validated engineering-simulation system. The README specifies how a generated machine should look, behave in a page, be reviewed and be recorded, but it does not describe a procedure for calibrating a model against physical measurements or validating its numerical behavior. The project README documents the workflow and bundled examples.
That leaves a specific trade-off for teams using it: a single-file interactive teardown can be useful for explanation, design discussion or demos, but the repository alone does not establish that its displayed values or motions are suitable for engineering decisions. Developers should treat physical fidelity as a requirement to verify separately, not a property supplied by the presentation pipeline.
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