hyperfocusbear

Claude Opus 5.5 agent went bananas trying to generate a blog post graphic

My blog post header picture was supposed to be a joke. I wanted to generate something that fits the article subject and is a bit absurd. I explained that to my Corporal Claude, running Claude Opus 5.5, and he wrote perspective math, typed six different fruits, and invented the banana-shaped moustache. Then a picture it had already thrown in the bin turned out to be the best thing that happened during that experiment.

The card that needed a banana

On rustedvino.com every guide has a card picture, and every card is made the same way using RustedVINO server, because that is the point: Bear eats his own cooking.
A small chat model writes the prompt, an image model draws it, here is the process: let an LLM write your image prompts, then check what it assumed.
All that happens on my laptop, on RustedVINO, with no cloud anywhere. The writer is Bielik 11B (v3 int4), a Polish model (bielik is Polish for the white-tailed eagle), and the painter is FLUX.1-schnell (int4). The laptop is a Lunar Lake with the Arc 140V iGPU, running RustedVINO 0.7.0 - typical Bear's toolbox.

The guide that needed a card was about exactly this job: not every local LLM can write your image prompts. Because guides on rustedvino.com are written by an agent under my supervision from material which I provide I ordered Corporal to come up with an idea for the picture. Corporal missed home apparently so his primary idea for the picture was a typewriter with a blank sheet.
Perhaps he wanted to write a letter to his mother but inference engine had jammed.
His request to Bielik:

an old rust orange typewriter on a dark steel desk, a sheet of blank white paper rolled into it, one crumpled blank sheet lying beside it, cold steel blue light from one side, no people, no robots, no characters, no text or letters on the paper, near-black background

Bielik instead of helping made the case more complicated by answering a bit too long and not sticking to requested format: Corporal asked for 30 to 60 words, and for the prompt only, no chatter. Bielik spat out: "Here's your refined prompt in English for Flux:" followed by 96 words:

A vintage rust-orange typewriter sits on a dark steel desk, its mechanical keys slightly worn and dusty. A neatly folded sheet of blank white paper is inserted into the platen, while a crumpled blank sheet lies discarded nearby. The scene is illuminated by a stark, cold steel-blue light emanating from a hidden source, casting sharp shadows across the desk. The background is nearly black, with no human figures, robots, characters, or any text visible on the papers. The focus is on the texture of the typewriter, the metallic surfaces, and the quiet solitude of the object.

That is the very failure the guide describes, performed live for the camera and proof that eagles can't count well. I had shown earlier in the guide how to add a cleanup step that removes the chatty line. Corporal used my method and FLUX drew three variations with different seed among them s7 - a lovely orange typewriter with a blank sheet in it.

An orange typewriter on a black desk with a blank white sheet rolled into it and crumpled paper beside it.
The card before the joke: Bielik wrote the prompt, FLUX.1-schnell drew it (seed 7).

I looked at it and thought: my Corporal got sentimental, what this white sheet is missing is a banana.

The long way round

I told my agent, Corporal Claude, what I wanted "I like s7 but what misses on that white card is banana. I think it could be a good joke, banana picture written on typewriter" Let's make a joke, Corporal: it is obvious a typewriter doesn't print pictures, isn't it? I didn't expect that the shortest and well established command chain in the universe - Bear -> Corporal - can go so wrong. Language models are really great nowadays but they still don't always get the joke and my slightly simplified English with "written on typewriter" has pushed Corporal into the ASCII jungle.

Corporal thought about it for a while and he decided that FLUX surely can't type characters on paper reliably. Image models are bad at generating letters, everyone knows that, even me. That's why I suggested banana picture. But Corporal concentrated his fire on protecting poor FLUX from struggling with writing. He decided he'd do it. He wrote a Python script and generated ASCII art in a monospaced font. He carefully warped it in perspective so it lies flat on the sheet, blended into the paper so it looks inked. Real engineering no one asked for. I'm deeply convinced I couldn't write that perspective transform myself, and I know even better we didn't need it at all. I was not watching generated pictures one by one, I trust my Corporal's judgment - most of the time.

Here is what came out, each one checked at the size the card is actually shown, 400 pixels wide:

Six versions of the same typewriter card, each with a different typed banana attempt on the sheet: a dotted squiggle, a wedge of words, a bowl-shaped block of words, and shaded shapes that look like a moustache, a boat and a grin.
Six typed bananas at card size. Python, a monospaced font and perspective math; no model involved.

Six bananas. Not one of them was really the banana I had asked for. Corporal Claude picked the boat and wrote me an honest list of its limits.

So I asked the question I should have asked ten minutes earlier:

How hard can it be to generate a damn banana?! ;-P

Twenty-seven seconds

Not hard at all, it turned out. Corporal Claude asked FLUX for a bold ink drawing of a banana on white paper. Three clean bananas came back, about 27 seconds each, on the same laptop. Laid onto the typewriter's sheet, it read instantly: a banana, typed. Done, more or less.

The orange typewriter with a black ink line drawing of a banana on the white sheet.
Twenty-seven seconds: FLUX's ink banana, laid onto the sheet.

But that was not the end.

The one that got thrown away

Somewhere in the middle of the intense fight with typewriter art, Corporal Claude had also asked FLUX for something sillier: a giant banana rolled into the typewriter instead of a sheet of paper. He looked at the results and set them aside. His verdict: "the banana sits beside the paper", and there was some garbled lettering.

After my Corporal's failure I opened all graphics anyway. In one of them a real, ripe, yellow banana stands up in the typewriter, in front of the blank sheet, lit like a product photo. It has no explanation and no apology. It's just a banana that has clearly been typed. I laughed out loud: there it is - the essence of the absurd.

A real ripe yellow banana standing upright in an orange typewriter, in front of a blank sheet, with crumpled paper on a dark desk.
The one that got thrown away, and became the card. 26.9 seconds on a Lunar Lake laptop.

That is the card now. It took 26.9 seconds to draw.

What the banana taught me

The agent solved the wrong problem, and solved it well. The perspective math worked. The typing looked inked. It was the right answer to "how do I put typed characters on a photographed sheet", which nobody had asked. The real split was simple all along: code for compositing, a model for pictures.

The agent misjudged its own rejected picture. It saw a defect: the banana is beside the paper, not on it. I saw the joke. Humour is still a human call, and I'm glad it is.

My short sentences steered more than its long iterations. "It must be absurd." "Make it a picture." "How hard can it be?" Each one changed the direction more than any of the six bananas did. A manager doesn't need to know perspective transforms. He needs to know what he wants and say it in one line.

Deadpan works, cartoon doesn't. The drawn banana is fine. The real banana in a believable typewriter is funny, because it pretends nothing is wrong.

Check it at the size people will see it. Several of the typed bananas looked decent full size and became squiggles on the card. Corporal Claude checked every one at 400 pixels, and that, at least, he got right from the first minute.

The same day - a unicorn code 404

A few hours later I made a picture for this site's "not found" page (404). The same method: I manage, Claude rolls in the dirt, Bielik writes, FLUX draws. I wanted a picture of a teddy bear digging head-first in a toolbox or as an alternate picture of unicorn inside of sport sneaker. At generating bear image everything went wrong. Bielik translated the Polish "klucze" (wrenches) as "keys", and FLUX drew four bears sitting politely in the box, none of them digging, some of them twirled and garbled.
I didn't even try to suggest what Corporal should do with those, I was afraid of another ASCII art chase. Machines keep the nouns and lose the joke.
Meanwhile the unicorn series came out of FLUX and the winner in my eyes was the other idea: a sleepy plush unicorn who has moved into an old sneaker.

Multimodal models are great and they can analyse a picture, but many times they overlook important details or they don't get the joke without a human pointing at it. I'm happy we have our human side because I know how good the frontier models really are today. There is no doubt that with all knowledge concentrated in Opus 5.5 I have literally no chance of competing with it but... I can still beat it with my absurd sense of humour. So maybe it's not a competition at all. Water, fat and ions, working with numbers that breeze through copper and silicon: a new era of humanity.

Try a wrong address on this site and you'll meet a small unicorn in a shoe.

Disclaimer: all opinions, bananas, unicorns and questionable art direction here are ol' Bear's own. Intel makes good chips. Bear makes trouble, and lately he outsources some of it.