Pixel & Pruts II: The Big Client

Pixel & Pruts II: The Big Client is the sequel to the comic Artificial Intelligence, Natural Laziness: again ten pages, in Dutch. Three weeks after part 1, Pixel & Pruts gets a message from Global Dynamics International, which wants to discuss a million-euro project. The seven colleagues from the canal-house attic go to a glass tower of thirty-eight floors. Mo optimises the access system, after which the team is locked out. The presentation hangs at 87 percent, lunch turns into 87 croquette rolls, and on the return visit the server turns out to be in the cellar, with a sticky note saying ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ as its security policy. Three new characters join: CEO Van Houten, IT director De Wit and finance director Bakker.

As in part 1, the AI exists only as text on screens. The drawings contain no text: balloons, signs and screens are HTML on top of the drawing. New are the toys. You can ask the assistant on Mo's screen a question yourself (it delegates everything), make the toaster start a workflow, have Daan's old laptop show different PHP, push a progress bar that springs back to 87 percent, make the dashboard figures rise (including ‘Problems’), and try the printer, which only prints when nobody needs anything. Without JavaScript the toys are off and you read the same comic. A reading bar shows which page you are on; the arrow keys and J/K turn pages, and there is a button for full screen and one for sound, which is off by default.

The drawings were made with the gpt-image-2 image model from three character sheets made for the comic. For scenes with many people around a table, a simple 3D layout was rendered first, with boxes for tables, chairs and people. It went to the image model as the composition, so everyone sits on their own chair and nobody passes through a table. Image costs were logged per call in a cost register with a hard limit of 20 euros. The API key lives only in a local .env file, not in the website and not in Git.

Built with Vite and TypeScript, without a framework, with Claude Code as programming assistant. Unit tests check, among other things, the number of pages and panels, the reading order of the balloons, that every drawing exists and that costs stay under the limit. End-to-end tests play with every toy and read the comic in Chromium, Firefox, WebKit and on a phone, also without JavaScript.