Bytes is an experiment in what a personal news app could be if it treated each day’s edition as an artifact rather than a feed. The core idea: instead of an infinite scroll of headlines, each edition is a discrete object, a day’s worth of news shaped into something worth looking at, not just reading.
The generative art is the unusual part. Three.js handles the 3D visual layer, D3 drives data-linked graphics, and the Claude API processes content to extract themes, sentiment, and visual cues that feed into the art generation. The result is that each edition looks different: the day’s news leaves a visual fingerprint. A day dominated by conflict looks different from a day of economic news, which looks different from a slow-news Friday.
Astro provides the content and routing layer: fast, content-first, with the generative components isolated as islands. The app is personal in the literal sense: it’s built around a specific set of sources and topics, not designed for general publishing. The interest here is in the intersection of journalism, generative art, and AI: what happens when you use a language model not to summarise news but to translate it into a visual vocabulary.
This is an ongoing experiment rather than a product with a roadmap. It gets worked on when the ideas are compelling enough to pull time away from the commercial projects.