# Prompt log Required by 15-113 Project 1: "a text document that contains the prompts you used (simply copy-pasted) and the replies you received." **Companion documents.** This file is the argument: what I asked for, what I rejected, and why. The blow-by-blow narrative lives in two transcripts, one per tool: - [`claude-code-chat-history.md`](claude-code-chat-history.md) — the Claude Code session that produced the six designs, four steps, each naming its commit. - [`cursor-ai-code-assistance-chat-history.md`](cursor-ai-code-assistance-chat-history.md) — the earlier Cursor session that built the multi-page scaffold, thirteen steps. **Tool used:** Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI), running Claude Opus 5. Two sessions on 5 September 2026. I worked in the terminal rather than a browser chat, which matters for reading this log: the model could read and edit files in the repository directly, so its "replies" are often a description of edits it made rather than a block of code for me to paste. **How to read this.** My prompts are quoted verbatim. The replies were long (the model narrates as it works), so I have summarised what each one actually produced and, more usefully, recorded **what I rejected or changed**. The rejections are the honest part. Anyone can get a model to emit a page; the work is knowing which parts to throw away. --- ## Session 1 — review the existing site ### Prompt 1 > review the code here, and walk me through the rest of setting up an incredible website for me **Reply, summarised.** It read every file in the repository, ran the build script, checked the live GitHub Pages deployment, resolved the DNS for my domain, and computed WCAG contrast ratios for every colour pair in the stylesheet. Then it reported findings and opened a pull request. The findings I would not have caught on my own: 1. **The site was publishing its own editing instructions.** The CV page's lede, in large serif type, read "Paste updates into `data/cv.md`, then run `python3 scripts/build.py`." Four other pages did the same thing. I had written those strings as notes to myself inside the build script and never registered that they were being rendered to visitors. 2. **Three "capstone" entries were placeholders** whose published summaries read "Paste the project summary here once the team opts in." 3. **Every canonical tag pointed at `https://ben.collier.phd`**, which has no DNS record. A canonical tag aimed at a domain that does not resolve tells Google the real page is a dead link. 4. **`collier.phd` was serving a default nginx page** over plain HTTP, and failing entirely over HTTPS. I did not know this. It also found the SPF record showing that domain carries my Google Workspace email, and warned me not to touch the MX and TXT records when I repoint the A record. 5. Link hover *lowered* contrast to 4.16:1, under the 4.5:1 floor. **What I changed in its work.** It initially wanted to delete `assets/portrait.webp` because the file is unreferenced and larger than the JPEG. I told it to leave my assets alone and just flag the file. It also left `https://ben.collier.phd` in the CV body text rather than rewriting my CV, which was the right call and it said so explicitly. ### Prompt 2 > merge the PR, I will take a look, but the existing site looks quite boring and vanilla. I want to build a site that catches someones attention and looks personal. this website is fulfilling two things, first I need a site as my main page for people finding me and especially booking any consulting work. I would like to have a way for people to have a paid consultation with me through Hot Metal.AI through the site. I want to show off student projects and my work etc. but this site is also for a class, > > https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~113/project1.html > > take inspiration from some of these student portfolios https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~113/students.html > > I want 5 different designs, all of them with a completely different design idea. make at least one very AI heavy, maybe looking like a neural network or robot or something. maybe just a small touch of having a cute robot follow your mouse around the screen every once in a while. > > give me the link to see the site when it's ready, give me a way to see the 5 different versions **Reply, summarised.** It merged the pull request, fetched and parsed the assignment page, and then flagged something I had lost track of: the project was due **that same day at 8:00 PM**, roughly six hours out. It also checked `hotmetal.ai` and found it returning a Wix domain-connection error, which is why the consulting section lives on this site rather than linking out. It then built five complete designs plus a picker page. --- ## Session 2 — a sixth design, run separately ### Prompt 3 > build one more design based on this prompt Run with Opus. Build in its own > directory, alongside the other five variants. Do not overwrite them; the > assignment rewards visible iteration. > > Build a personal portfolio website for Ben Collier. Single page, static, > deployable to GitHub Pages. Plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. No > framework, no build step, no dependencies beyond a webfont. It must run by > opening index.html. > > THE CONCEPT > > The site is a terminal session in which Ben himself is the agent being run. > This is a deliberate, self-aware joke: he teaches and researches agentic AI, > so the portfolio presents his own life as an agent execution trace with a > task queue, a run history and a log. > > [Full brief continues: three named sections, an amber-on-near-black palette > with specific hex values, a 70-80 character measure, one animated element > under two seconds, two booking commands, an explicit list of things to avoid, > and a ban on writing three particular words on the page.] I wrote this brief myself rather than asking for "a terminal design", which is the difference between the result and a template. It specifies the concept, the structure, the palette down to hex values, the measure in characters, what to animate and what not to, and an explicit list of failure modes. It also bans the tired version of the idea by name: no fake shell where the visitor types commands. **Reply, summarised.** Built `designs/agent/` as `index.html`, `style.css`, `script.js`, `README.md` and a copy of the portrait, self-contained enough to run from `file://`. Measured every colour against the background before committing to it. Then found and fixed a real bug in its own work, described below. ### The bug that was worth the session The first version hid the task queue and the command line behind the typing animation. Rendering the page from `file://` in headless Chrome starved `requestAnimationFrame`, the animation never ran, and the page showed an empty box where the content should have been. The brief said it must run by opening `index.html`, and it did not. Three fixes came out of that: 1. **The animation stopped owning the content.** The command line now reveals by widening a clip in whole character units, which in a monospace face is literally character-by-character typing. The full string stays in the DOM the whole time. The first version emptied `textContent` and refilled it, so a stalled animation destroyed the text permanently. 2. **The fallback moved out of the file that can fail.** A dead man's switch in the inline `` script strips the hiding class after 2.8 seconds, and the stylesheet carries its own reveal at 2.6 seconds. A fallback living inside `script.js` is not a fallback if `script.js` is the thing that stalled. 3. **The starting clip is written by the first frame, not at setup**, so an inline style can never outlive a stall and hide the content for good. Separately: the first implementation chained about 45 `setTimeout` calls. Browsers clamp those to roughly 1Hz in a tab that is not in the foreground, which stretched a 1.6 second animation to eleven seconds in testing. It is now one `requestAnimationFrame` loop deriving its state from elapsed time, so a throttled tab lands on the finished state rather than crawling through it. None of this was visible by looking at the page in a normal browser tab. It came out of rendering it the way the brief said it had to work. ### Other things I changed in this one - **The measure was wrong and the CSS lied about it.** `max-width: 74ch` on a border-box element with side padding measured out to 68 characters of actual text, under the 70 the brief asked for. Switched that element to `content-box` so the number means what it says. It is 76 characters now. - **Removed the office address.** The brief bans one particular word on the page, and the postal address was the only place it appeared. It is also the least terminal-native line in a contact block, so it went rather than got abbreviated. - **Scanlines were at 0.06 alpha over a 2px period**, which moirés against the line height and reads as a Halloween filter. Dropped to 0.022 over 3px. - **Cut a glow from every glyph.** On a full page of monospace a text-shadow is a blur, not a CRT. It now sits only on the three status keywords and the cursor. ### One thing to resolve before this goes live The brief describes 70-445 as "AI for Business Leaders", an undergraduate course in its first run. The main site currently redirects 70-445 to 45-881 Modern Data Management, on the basis that the undergraduate catalogue number was relabelled. Both cannot be right. This design uses the brief. --- ## What I directed, and what I rejected This is the part that matters for the interview, so it is specific. ### The five designs were my brief, not the model's I asked for five *different design arguments*, not five colour schemes. The first thing the model proposed was five variations on the same single-page scroll layout with different palettes. I rejected that. The five that shipped have genuinely different **structures**: | Design | The structural idea | | --- | --- | | Neural | Full-bleed canvas simulation behind everything; content floats over it | | Broadsheet | Real CSS multi-column newsprint, drop cap, classified-ad pricing | | Steel | Full-width horizontal bands with riveted dividers | | Notebook | Jupyter cells with execution counters and dataframe outputs | | Studio | Strict Swiss grid, fixed numbered rail, enormous display type | ### Neural: the network background The first version compared every node against every other node each frame. At 230 nodes that is about 26,000 distance checks per frame and it dropped frames on a laptop. I asked for spatial hashing: file each node into a grid bucket the size of the link radius, then only search the nine surrounding buckets. That is `buildGrid()` in `designs/neural/index.html`, and it is the one thing on the page I would call a real optimisation. I also rejected the palette. Its first pass was cyan-on-black, which is the default "AI website" look and appears in roughly every template. I replaced it with the warm rust already used across the rest of my site. ### The robot was my idea and I had to argue for the timing The model built a cursor-following robot that was on screen permanently. That is a novelty toy and it gets annoying in about fifteen seconds. My note was "occasional, not a permanent cursor pet." It now arrives, trails the cursor with easing so it reads as catching up rather than being glued on, says one short line, and leaves for 25 to 55 seconds. It is also disabled entirely under `prefers-reduced-motion` and on touch pointers. ### Notebook: I cut a fake Python interpreter The model offered to build something that looked like it was executing the Python in the cells. I cut it. The entire argument of my teaching is that you should be able to say what a model did and where it fails; a page that pretends to run code it is not running fails that on its own terms. The notebook design now says so in its footer, in plain words. What I kept is the execution counter. `In [n]` in Jupyter reflects the order you *ran* cells, not their position in the file, so a visitor who runs cell 7 first sees `In [1]` there. The model had numbered them statically, which misses the whole joke. ### Broadsheet: fake columns Its first draft faked newspaper columns with a CSS grid, which breaks reading order — you finish a box and have to jump back up. I asked for real `column-count` so text flows the way newsprint does. ### Steel: eighty divs of decoration The rivets along each band divider were originally eighty individual `
` elements. I replaced them with one repeating radial-gradient background: one paint instead of eighty DOM nodes. I also cut a suggested hero video. Loading several megabytes to communicate "industrial" is a bad trade on a page whose argument is that I understand cost. ### Studio: restraint has to be real The first draft was dense, because that is what most training data looks like. I roughly doubled every vertical rhythm value and cut about a third of the words. I also cut a fade-in on every element down to a single clip-path reveal on the portrait, so one thing moves instead of forty. ### Contrast, everywhere I asked it to measure rather than guess. It computed WCAG ratios and several colours failed: | Element | Before | After | | --- | --- | --- | | Link hover (main site) | 4.16:1 | 6.82:1 | | `.c-rust` course tile label | 4.51:1 | 5.78:1 | | Steel's molten orange on steel | 3.1:1 | 6.2:1 | It also found a dark-mode bug I would never have seen: the course-tile label text read from a `--white` token that inverts in dark mode, so the labels went dark-on-colour while the tiles stayed light. It now has its own token. ### The consulting pricing The model wanted a "Contact for pricing" button. I told it to publish the numbers, because making somebody ask for a price is a tax on their time and it filters out exactly the direct people I want to work with. All five designs read the same rate card from one shared file, `designs/shared/booking.js`. I also insisted the page never imply it can take a card when it cannot. Until a Stripe payment link is pasted in, every button says "Request this" and opens a prefilled email, and each design prints a line saying card payment is not connected yet. --- ## What I would tell a TA about using AI here The model is very fast at producing a plausible page and genuinely bad at knowing when to stop. Almost every edit I made was a **subtraction**: the fake interpreter, the permanent robot, the eighty rivet divs, the fade-in on everything, a third of the words in Studio. Left alone it adds. Where it was better than me: measuring things. It computed every contrast ratio, checked every internal link across twenty pages, parsed the sitemap and feed as XML, and caught that my canonical tags pointed at a dead domain and that my apex domain was serving a stock nginx page. I had been looking at that site for a week and had not noticed any of it. The division that worked: **it measures and drafts, I decide and cut.** --- ## Files where the AI usage is documented in code Each design carries an `AI USAGE NOTE` comment block at the top of its stylesheet listing what was drafted, what I changed, and why: - `designs/neural/index.html` - `designs/broadsheet/index.html` - `designs/steel/index.html` - `designs/notebook/index.html` - `designs/studio/index.html` - `designs/agent/` — all three files, plus its own `README.md` - `designs/index.html` (the picker) - `scripts/build.py` and `css/site.css` for the multi-page version ## Credits Every design footer names its typefaces and their designers, all under the SIL Open Font License via Google Fonts, and credits the portrait photograph to Carnegie Mellon University. All project thumbnails are original SVG drawings made for this site. No templates and no stock photography were used.