The thing moving behind all the text is alive, and looking for tasty projects to eat.
The organism is computed in your browser, frame by frame, while you are watching it.
A few thousand foragers, each carrying nothing but a position and a heading. Every frame a forager samples the trail map ahead of it — left, centre, right — turns toward whichever reads strongest, steps forward and lays a little trail of its own. Then the map blurs and fades. That is the whole ruleset. No forager can see another; they coordinate only through the shared field, the way ants organise around pheromone. The network is not drawn or stored anywhere — it is what those rules settle into.
It begins the same way on every visit, because the foragers are seeded deterministically rather than at random, and stops being the same the moment you do anything: whichever colony you select becomes food, and so does your cursor — or your finger, while it is touching the dish.
A live Physarum polycephalum model — a slime mould which is, improbably, a single cell: one membrane, many nuclei, no brain, nothing that could be called a controller. It is nonetheless very good at networks.
Nakagaki, Yamada and Tóth put one in a maze in 2000; it withdrew from the dead ends and held the connecting path, taking the shortest or second-shortest route in fourteen of nineteen trials. Ten years later Tero and colleagues laid oat flakes across greater Tokyo where the towns are, using bright light — which the mould avoids — as terrain. What grew matched the rail network for efficiency, fault tolerance and cost.
Every project here is a nutrient source.
The organism is not drawn as shapes. It is a grid of numbers much coarser than your screen, each value simply how much trail is in that cell, passed through a curve that eases toward full brightness so the dense cores keep their structure instead of flattening into white.
The colour is arithmetic rather than a palette — red climbs quadratically and so arrives late, green rises straight, blue stays low — which is why faint filaments come out teal and only the densest trail warms through to bone. Nothing chose those hues. Drawing that small grid across the whole canvas leaves the browser's own smoothing to do the blurring, so the softness costs nothing. The name at the top inverts against whatever passes behind it.
The six colony accents ease between four palettes and back on a loop of about two minutes — slowly enough that you only notice if you stay a while. If a category looked amber earlier and green now, that is the point.
Peter Repetti, with Claude Code. The site was designed and built through that collaboration, and so were most of the projects in the dish.
It seems right that the organism on the front page works with no central plan — leaving traces and unexpected connections for the next pass to follow. That is how all of this came to be.
Third time’s the charm.