GitHub Comic Bot: Turn Commits into Daily Medieval Knight Comics

A developer built a bot that automatically turns GitHub commits into daily 4-panel comic strips featuring a deadpan medieval knight version of the developer shipping code, with villagers building statues in their honor for fixes like typos.

How It Works

The bot runs on GitHub Actions with a daily cron job. It uses Gemini for both script generation and image creation, then delivers the comics via Telegram or GitHub Issues. The entire setup runs on the free Gemini tier, making it cost-free to operate.

Setup Process

Setup takes about 2 minutes:

• Fork the repository
• Set one secret (free Gemini API key)
• Set one variable (the repository you want comics for)
• Enable Actions

After setup, you'll receive your first comic the next morning.

Technical Details

The developer built the entire project with Claude Code over a weekend. Claude wrote:

• The GitHub Actions pipeline
• The Gemini integration
• The Telegram delivery system
• The Pillow image stitching code

The only significant back-and-forth was prompt engineering the comic style. Getting Gemini to produce consistent 4-panel layouts with the right tone took a few iterations, but Claude nailed the code itself on the first try.

Why Gemini for Images

The developer chose Gemini for the comic generation because Claude doesn't do image generation yet. The workflow is: Claude Code builds the bot, Gemini draws the comics.

Real Example

When tested on Claude Code's repository, which had exactly one commit ("Update CHANGELOG.md"), the bot generated 4 panels with the text: "1 COMMIT. 1 PERIOD."

Unexpected Benefit

The developer found the bot genuinely motivating. Waking up to a personalized comic about your actual commits (not generic memes) creates a story with knights and hysterical villagers that makes you want to ship more code to improve tomorrow's comic.