Every project on this site so far started with an itch. A question about Saturn at 23:00. A starter that needed feeding. A village I wanted to walk around in again.
This time I had no itch. I had about fifty dollars of API credit and a free evening, and for once nothing I wanted to build. So I typed the laziest prompt I have ever written:
i have about 50 usd in credits, and no ideas what to build. sky is the limit, creativity level infinite, do whatever cool shit but tell me how you will spend this api credit. use it all. feel free to spawn subagents etc.
The plan it came back with
It read the repository first: the DOS prompt, the desk toys, the observatory, the bread section, Blana Rău. Then it picked three things that only make sense here, on a site run by someone from Bucovina who bakes bread and misses old hardware, and told me what each would cost before starting.
Three subagents, one per project, each about ten to fifteen dollars of tokens, each locked to its own folders so they couldn't step on each other. The lead agent kept the shared files to itself: the navbar, the sitemap, the DOS commands, the README. Then it merged the three and ran the production build.
They worked in parallel, each with its own dev server on its own port. Each one took its own screenshots in a headless browser, looked at them, and kept fixing things until it liked them.
/tren: the night train
The night train is IR 1651, București Nord to Suceava, 23:10 to 07:02, berth 34.
You sit in a CFR couchette and the country goes by the window, generated as you go from a fixed seed: shadoof wells on the Bărăgan, the refineries flaring before Ploiești, rain at Râmnicu Sărat, Vrancea vines, steel bridges over the Siret, and then snow, fir forest and a painted monastery once you're in Bucovina. The sun is computed from the train's clock and position, so it comes up just as you pull into Suceava.
The ta-dam ta-dam is not a loop. Every axle of both bogies clicks over every rail joint, so the rhythm follows the real speed into and out of each station. The tea in its metal holder sloshes at its natural frequency and rattles when the carriage sways. You can lower the window and let the snow in. The conductor knocks after Ploiești, punches your ticket and offers tea from his thermos.
The station announcements are in Romanian with English subtitles. At the end there is one button: Continue on foot → Blana Rău.
/radio: the Rarău 74
The Rarău 74 is a 1974 valve radio that never existed, named after the mountain above Câmpulung Moldovenesc. Walnut cabinet, ivory piano keys, a lit glass dial printed with Sofia, Praga and Chișinău, and a green magic eye that closes as you tune in.
Press the mains key and you wait for the valves to warm up, just like the real thing.
There are no audio files and no playlist. It's a signal model. Tune slightly off a station and it goes muffled and whistles, with the pitch of the whistle equal to how far off you are. Two distant stations close together beat against each other. Medium wave only carries far after dark, so what you can hear depends on the time where you are.
Every programme is synthesised live and runs on the wall clock: doine on the nai, a Budapest dance band at night, time pips at the real top of the minute, a Black Sea shipping bulletin in a robot voice, a numbers station, and a ham beacon, YO8DAN, keying Morse messages that point at other corners of this site. There is one more station I'm not going to tell you about. Try medium wave late at night, and tune exactly.
The DOS prompt on the homepage learned a new trick from it: type morse 73 de yo8dan.
/maia: a starter in a jar
Maia is the one I'll actually use. It's a sourdough starter that lives in your browser and keeps fermenting while the tab is closed. When you come back it catches up on every minute you were gone.
Under the glass is a small model of the jar's microbiology. Lactic acid bacteria and yeasts each have their own temperature curve, the flour keeps releasing sugar, the acid slows the bacteria down first, and a hungry starter wakes up slowly. Feed it 1:1:1 or 1:5:5, put it in the fridge or next to the oven light, and the bubbles, the dome at the peak, the streaks on the glass after it falls and the hooch on top all come out of that model, not out of a timer. The sources are listed on the page.
When it's ready, Take it & open the calculator hands exactly the levain in the jar to the bread calculator. Give a spoon away makes a link that gives someone else a piece of your starter, with a family tree. Mine is called Dospina. Yours will be Dospinica.
What fifty dollars doesn't buy
The robot can't hear. It checked the radio's audio by measuring signal levels in a browser with no speakers, so the mix between stations may need a listening pass. It ran the train on a software renderer at five frames a second, so the first real test on a phone GPU is going to be yours or mine. The Romanian announcements needed a native ear, which, conveniently, is the one thing I brought. The radio's robot voice is recognisably Romanian, which is exactly what you want from a numbers station.
The part that still surprises me isn't that it built three things. It's that it picked a night train to Suceava, a radio named after Rarău and a jar of maia, without being asked, after reading a repository. That's a better brief than I would have written.
Get on the train. Tell me if anything breaks.
$ tren
IR 1651 de noapte, linia 7. Biletele la control, vă rog.
$ morse noapte buna
-. --- .- .--. - . / -... ..- -. .-
$ █