While most of the puzzles on the Daily Baffle were intended to be rather challenging, for this one I really just wanted to make something somewhat beautiful and relaxing. It wasn't so much about coming up with a highly original idea or a difficult challenge as much as just combining a few familiar ideas in a pleasant way.
It was coded entirely by Claude, with me carefully prodding it on to achieve the look I wanted. I had hand-coded everything on the Daily Baffle, but those days are past now. I was pretty thrilled with the "window through the fog" effect that CC was able to achieve from my written design spec. I wasn't sure if that would come out right, but it did. It's just a static react app hosted on Render, no backend. The haikus are handwritten with the help of a massive list of generated nature concepts alongside possible metaphor angles. The art is generated by Gemini and ChatGPT. I wish it was hand-painted, but that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming and then this puzzle would likely not exist.
Happy to answer any questions, and encourage anyone to check out the Baffle if they like harder puzzles!