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ShaderKit

A browser GLSL editor I built for my own art

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I make fractal art with GLSL and got tired of fighting Shadertoy's limits when I wanted to actually finish and export pieces. So I built the tool I wanted: ShaderKit runs in the browser, fully ShaderToy-compatible, but adds the export pipeline that was missing for me.- Loop examination mode: visualizes the transition point of a looping shader in slow motion so you can see exactly where it breaks. X-time remapping helps debug discontinuities by mapping time to the x coordinate, this way you can see literally if the loop is seamless or not, if you see any seams, its not seamless. This is what I needed most for my own work.- Cloud rendering up to 8K with supersampling- A GIF exporter allowing for setting custom color palettes and choice of dithering algorithmThe main editor and features are free. Cloud rendering is paid because GPU time costs money. There's an optional Claude-based vibe-mode as well.Would especially love feedback on the loop tools from anyone who writes seamless shader loops, that's the part of the problem I think is most under-served.https://shaderkit.com

HN · launched May 15, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views

Niche: browser code execution environments · 38 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • Dev tools
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial Building a browser GLSL editor is straightforward, but architecting an asynchronous headless GPU cloud rendering cluster capable of compiling custom shaders into 8K 60fps video exports is non-trivial.

What it would actually take: The frontend consists of a WebGL canvas and CodeMirror/Monaco editor, but the cloud pipeline requires an elastic backend GPU worker pool (using AWS G4/G5 instances with Vulkan/EGL or headless Chromium with GPU passthrough). The complex part is securely sandboxing arbitrary user GLSL code, preventing infinite loops or GPU crashes, frame-by-frame off-screen rendering at 8K, and streaming frames directly into FFmpeg encoding pipelines. This requires deep graphics infrastructure, cloud orchestration, and GPU virtualization skills.

Discussion

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 298 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #275 of 299 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 193 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.