A solar system in thirty minutes, and a music room in one shot

Last night was supposed to be an early night. That sentence has never once been true on this website.

First this place grew a bread section. Now a personal site pretending to be a 1994 DOS machine has a backyard space observatory and a piano and guitar music room. Again, nobody approved this. There is no product roadmap here — just me, a terminal after 11 p.m., and whatever stray question I failed to let go of before bed.

Thirty minutes to Neptune

It started around 23:00 with a simple itch: I wanted to look up what was in the sky above me and spin around Saturn without installing a 400-megabyte desktop planetarium, clicking "Reject All" on fifteen cookie banners, or standing outside in the cold at 3 a.m.

We vibe coded the first working version of /sky in about thirty minutes.

Half an hour of back-and-forth in the terminal, and suddenly there was a live interactive sky chart running on astronomy-engine and a 3D solar system rendered in Three.js:

A live sky map calculated for your actual latitude, longitude, and timezone — constellations, planets, deep-sky objects, rise and set times, tonight's dark window, and a red night-vision mode so your screen doesn't ruin your eyes if you actually take your phone outside.
Ten destinations in 3D, from the Sun out to Neptune (plus the Moon), with orbital positions computed for whatever timestamp you scrub to.
Two ways to look at space: a scenic route with compressed logarithmic spacing so you can see the whole neighbourhood at once, and a true scale toggle, which immediately teaches you the foundational lesson of astrophysics — space is mostly empty, and we are tiny dots.

Thirty minutes got the planets orbiting. If I were a sensible person, I would have gone to sleep at 23:33.

Then the "what else?" kicked in

I wrote a month ago about learning Unix at Warpnet in 1999 and the habit I still haven't shaken: once a thing works, I immediately want to know what else I can make it do.

A static textured sphere for Earth felt a little too polite. So the thirty-minute solar system kept growing new instruments:

Animated worlds: every planet got its own custom GLSL shader vignette — solar plasma and eruptions on the Sun, Mercury's sodium tail streaming away from solar wind, Venus's superrotating cloud veil, Martian dust devils, Jupiter's counter-flowing cloud belts, Saturn's icy ring particles orbiting at independent Keplerian speeds, and brief meteoroid impact flashes on the Moon. All of it pauses cleanly if you toggle motion off or have prefers-reduced-motion enabled.
Live clouds and live aurora on Earth: the globe wraps itself in timestamped EUMETSAT infrared cloud composites, and ray-marches 3D curtains of aurora borealis and australis at true altitude around the geomagnetic poles (green oxygen emissions from ~100 km, red tops above 200 km), shaped by NOAA's live OVATION forecast and kept on the night side as Earth rotates. There's also a dedicated Aurora tab that reads live solar wind and the Kp index to answer one plain question for your location: will the sky dance tonight?
110 Messier objects, 297 missions, and a Scale Lab: a complete Messier deep-sky atlas with real portraits, a mission explorer with packaged NASA/JPL Horizons trajectories you can replay (Voyager, Cassini, Juno, James Webb), and a Scale Lab that shrinks the Sun to the size of a grapefruit or a beach ball and tells you how long it would take to walk to Neptune at 5 km/h.

Not bad for an evening that started with "let's just draw a few orbits."

The music learner, in one shot

At 00:06, right in the middle of all that, I had a second thought: while we're building rooms in this house, I want a quiet place to practice piano and guitar chords and scales.

And unlike the observatory, which turned into a multi-hour rabbit hole of orbital mechanics and space weather feeds, the Little music room came out in one shot.

One prompt. One commit. Twelve roots, eight chord formulas, five scale formulas, two instruments, synthesized audio, and guided practice — working on the first pass.

Most music theory websites make me want to close my laptop. They either look like a scanned PDF from 1997, put a paywall in front of a minor seventh chord, or try to gamify your practice with daily streaks, XP bars, and notifications asking why you haven't practiced C major today.

I wanted the opposite. A calm room with good light where you can hear how notes fit together:

Piano and guitar, side by side: a two-octave keyboard (C3 to C5) and a six-string guitar view that switches between fingered chord diagrams (familiar open voicings plus movable E-shape and A-shape barre chords) and a full 12-fret neck map for scales.
Real music theory under the hood: notes are spelled by their actual scale degree rather than lazy pitch-class tables, so E♯, F♭, and double accidentals show up where the harmony says they belong. You can flip the labels between note names (C · E♭ · G) and intervals (1 · ♭3 · 5) with one click.
Zero audio files: there are no megabytes of piano samples to download. A tiny Web Audio API engine synthesizes each note on the spot by stacking sine oscillators at the fundamental, second, and third harmonics (1, 0.28, 0.12) with soft envelopes — and staggers guitar chords by 35 milliseconds per string so a chord actually sounds strummed.
Practice without pressure: hit Try guided practice and it asks you to find each note on the keyboard or fretboard, one at a time. No countdown timer, no score, no failing grade. Tap F♯ when it asked for G and it just says: "That's F♯. Look for G — take your time." Everything stays in localStorage on your own device.

What vibe coding actually is when it clicks

People talk about vibe coding like it's pressing a button and watching a slot machine pay out a finished app. Sometimes, like with /music, a single well-aimed shot really does land cleanly on the first try. Other times, like with /sky, the first thirty minutes just open the door to five more questions you didn't know you had.

Either way, the model doesn't care whether a guitar chord voicing is physically playable by a human hand. It doesn't care that Safari likes to suspend an AudioContext the moment you blink, or that a navigation bar shouldn't wrap at 320 pixels, or that a night-sky tool shouldn't blind someone standing in a dark field.

Caring about the details is still our job. The difference is that the distance between "I wonder if I could build this" and turning the monitor toward someone to say "look at this" has collapsed into a Tuesday night.

Go take a walk past Saturn in /sky, or play a few major seventh chords in /music. Tell me if anything breaks. I'll probably be up too late fixing it anyway.

$ cd /sky && cd /music
Leaving the atmosphere. Please keep your tabs inside the spacecraft.
Making a little room for music. No perfect pitch required.
$ █