ShaderKit
A browser GLSL editor I built for my own art
Details
- External ID
- 48154867
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- ShaderKit
- Website domain
- shaderkit.com
- Launched
- May 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1147011308562197
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- graphic design assets and utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- browser glsl shader editor
- Manually corrected
- False
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
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 132 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #118 of 133 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 193 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Wave · hn · 2026-09-25 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Shader Lab, like Photoshop but for shaders · hn · 2026-04-16 · 160 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Zephyr3D · hn · 2025-11-26 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Browser-based video compositor built on WebGPU · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- FRCTL · ph · 2026-09-25 · 71 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Quasicrystals Animation Playground with WebXR · hn · 2026-08-15 · 40 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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