The thing moving behind the type is alive, and it is looking for the work.
Everything you scrolled through — the organism, the colony menu, the search, all 29 project entries — travels inside the document, about 40 KB of it. Once the page has loaded, the organism is computed in your browser, frame by frame, for as long as you are watching it.
What is being computed is a few thousand agents, each carrying nothing but a position and a heading. Every frame, an agent samples the trail map at three points ahead of itself — left, centre, right — turns toward whichever reads strongest, steps forward, and lays down a little trail of its own. Then the whole map blurs slightly and fades. That is the entire ruleset.
No agent can see another one. They coordinate only by reading and writing the same shared field, which is how ants organise around pheromone: you leave a trace, someone else follows it, the trace gets stronger. The network is never drawn or stored anywhere — it is simply what those rules settle into.
It begins the same way on every visit, because the agents are seeded deterministically rather than at random. It stops being the same the moment you do anything, since your cursor is food, and so is whichever colony you select.
It is a live Physarum polycephalum model — a slime mould which is, improbably, a single cell: one enormous membrane carrying many nuclei, with no brain, no neurons, and nothing that could be called a controller.
It is nonetheless unreasonably good at networks. In 2000, writing in Nature, Nakagaki, Yamada and Tóth put one into a maze with food at both ends. It withdrew from the dead ends and held only the connecting path, finding the shortest or second-shortest route in fourteen of nineteen trials.
Ten years later, in Science, Tero and colleagues laid oat flakes across a map of greater Tokyo at the positions of the surrounding towns, using bright light — which the mould avoids — to stand in for mountains and water. It grew a network comparable in efficiency, fault tolerance and cost to the rail system human engineers had spent decades refining.
Every project is a nutrient source. That is why the mould reaches toward whatever you pick — selecting a colony moves its food, and the organism re-routes to find it. On a desktop your cursor is food too.
prefers-reduced-motion it holds still entirelyThe organism is never drawn as shapes. It is a grid of numbers — a few hundred cells across, considerably coarser than your screen — where each value is simply how much trail has been laid in that cell. Turning that into a picture takes three steps.
First the numbers are compressed. A trail value can climb without limit, so each one is passed through a curve that eases toward full brightness instead of hitting it. That is what stops the dense cores flattening into featureless white, and it is why you can still see structure inside the brightest parts.
Then colour, from arithmetic rather than a palette. Red, green and blue are each a different function of that single brightness value: red climbs quadratically, so it arrives late; green rises straight; blue stays low throughout. The consequence is that faint filaments come out teal, and only where the trail is genuinely dense does red catch up and the colour warm through to bone. Nothing chose those hues — they fall out of the curves.
Then it is scaled up. The small grid is written into an offscreen image and drawn across the full canvas, and the browser's own smoothing does the blurring on the way. The soft, wet, out-of-focus quality is not a blur effect; it is interpolation, and it costs nothing.
Two thin layers sit on top: a vignette pulling the edges down into the dark, and a halftone dot pattern at about five percent, which is what lends the whole thing its faintly printed quality. The name at the top is set to invert against whatever passes behind it, which is why it turns dark when a bright filament crosses a letter.
The six colony accents are not fixed. They ease between four palettes and back on a loop of about two minutes — slowly enough that you only notice if you stay a while. One palette gives every colony its own hue; another pulls the whole set toward warm earth. If a category looked amber earlier and green now, that is the point.
Peter Repetti, with Claude Code. The site was designed and built that way, and so were most of the things in it.
It seems right that the thing on the front page works with no central plan — leaving traces for the next pass to follow, and letting the weak routes fade. That is close to how all of it got made.