Driving North on I91 from Rocky Hill to Hartford, I looked out at the great plains before the CT river and declared...
You know what CT needs. Some Buffopotamus. Let's put some Buffalo, and some Hippos out in that field, something something, profit!
My wife humored me as is usually the case, but it did not end there. I would sprinkle Buffopotamus into conversations here and there. Eventually, I bought buffopotam.us because I mean look at that domain name.
I have toyed with AI a few times to help bring the Buffopotamus to life, and now I'm going to start a series talking about some of that. If you happened to click on the link above, you'd have stumbled into a completely AI generated site about Biff, the Buffopotamus.
I started with a seed text. I used Cline.bot for the whole thing. You can tell because it left behind the cline_docs folder. We'll talk more about cline_docs and agentic context caches in this series.
This is the part of the post where I was going to talk about the prompts, but I lost them. Today I learned Cline stores it's data on the machine it's running, and I did all of my work on remotely via vscode, and happened to repave the remote mac I was working on yesterday AM after making sure everything was in git. This is what I remember.
- I started asking Cline to create specs and requirements in markdown. You can see all of those in the root of the project.
- I then started working with Cline on the implementation. Cline started with a static site, and hit a wall when I redirected to Astro. I don't think Cline would have gotten over that wall on it's own.
- The story, content, images, everything was generated with no direction. All my direction was towards the engineering side.
- The main session cost about 8$. With another dollar or two in image generation.
Once I "vibe coded" most of it, I was left with some "vibe debugging". Cline's use of the browser helps a lot with testing and debugging. "When I click on this link I get an error, can you troubleshoot" is pretty effective for simple issues. Cline's plan/act mode also works pretty well with debugging, you can chat about the problem before fixing it.
The first swing in this series took about 3 hours, much of the time was spent marshalling prompts from Cline to fal.ai for image generation. I need to get an MCP for image generation working before my next swing.
There was no vibe deploy, I setup the deployment to Cloudflare. Cline did add the artifacts I'd need in project, but I spent the time with github actions and cloudflare to wire all that up.
One interesting exercise, at some point I lost track of the images I had to generate, so I asked Cline to make a list of the missing images with their prompts. That led to this md.
You can view the entire repository here.
Drop me a comment or a message somewhere if you have some thoughts on directions to go. I intend to keep them all live to watch all of the iterations.