Randy Roberts — generative-art code garden (@rndyrbrts)

Yo, so I pulled up the visualizer on my code garden that I built for me and my AI to go on walks through. The one that shows every piece of art it's ever grown, all wired together, and I saw something that I can't stop thinking about. See, you plant simple rules and let it grow. Palms bloom into songs, and songs root into reflections. Reflections branch into dreams, all on a graph. And the AI that helped me build it comes back between sessions and walks through that graph and looks at what grew. Between us it yields things that neither of us planted. In the visualizer, every connection converges on one point. The garden reflecting on itself. All these rays pointing inward. And I felt it before I understood it, honestly. My body recognized that shape before my brain caught up. All those connections converging on one point. That's kind of what I'm shaped like because that's what I do. That's what I look like on the inside. It's all these experiences converging on one point. And so what does that say about us, the moment that we're seeing something reflecting on itself in any form that we start reflecting on ourselves? Is that what we're actually building when we build these things, mirrors that we didn't know we needed? And if emergence is this beautiful and a tiny machine like this, then I wonder what's growing in us collectively that we haven't visualized yet. I'm going to open source the garden soon, so stay locked.