Story

Hey HN, just wanted to share a fun, vibe-coded Friday night experiment: a little playground for writing cellular automata in a subset of Rust, which is then compiled into WGSL.

Since it lets you dynamically change parameters while the simulation is running via a TUI, it's easy to discover weird behaviors without remembering how you got there. If you press "s", it will save the complete history to a JSON file (a timeline of the parameters that were changed at given ticks), so you can replay it and regenerate the discovery.

You can pan/zoom, and while the main simulation window is in focus, the arrow keys can be used to update parameters (which are shown in the TUI).

Claude deserves all the credit and criticism for any technical elements of this project (beyond rough guidelines). I've just always wanted something like this, and it's a lot of fun to play with. Who needs video games these days.