Cellarium: A Playground for Cellular Automata
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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.
HN · launched Feb 21, 2026 · 41 upvotes (top 21%) · 0 views
Niche: scientific and system simulation software · 74 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 74 launches in scientific and system simulation software →
Could you build this?
Yes The creator explicitly confirms it was a vibe-coded Friday night experiment combining a simple Rust subset transpiler, WGSL shaders, and a Ratatui TUI.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 588 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #145 of 589 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 115 days after the earliest competitor.
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- delirium-physics · github · 2026-10-16 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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