# Ricardo Garcia

- **Event:** [Built with Opus 4.7: a Claude Code hackathon](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-4-7-hackathon)
- **When:** Apr 21 at 12:00 PM – Apr 27 at 2:00 AM (EDT)
- **Where:** Online
- **Team:** [Ricardo Garcia](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/vellent)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/ricgarcas/character-chat
- **Demo video:** https://youtu.be/iHfslqbO37A
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-4-7-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-4-7-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/278

Character Chat is an exploratory study into how Claude Opus 4.7 can power a new generation of historical and educational tools. Users hold real-time, in-character conversations with historical figures — Frida Kahlo, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and Salvador Dalí — each rendered as a pixel-art avatar with reactive emotes and a themed environment that reflects their world.

 The problem it solves:

History and humanities education often feel static — textbooks, lectures, and Wikipedia pages.

Students rarely get to engage with the figures they study. Existing chatbots either break character instantly or default to a flat, encyclopedic tone that strips away personality, contradiction, and emotion — the very things that make these figures worth knowing.

The approach:

Character Chat uses Opus 4.7's adaptive extended thinking to match cognitive effort to the question being asked. Casual greetings get a fast, reflexive reply (thinking disabled). Medium-depth questions trigger a 2,000-token thinking budget. Genuinely philosophical prompts ("what is suffering in art?") unlock a 6,000-token deep-thinking pass, so Frida actually thinks before answering — the way she would have. Combined with structured stage-direction markers parsed by the frontend, the avatar reacts emotionally in sync with the response.

It's a study, not a final product: a testbed for how Claude's reasoning capabilities can transform passive historical content into living, in-character dialogue for classrooms, museums, and cultural institutions.

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