Finally got some time to play with something I've always wanted, a whiteboard that actually makes your system come to life. Very early days. Very simple. But I have so many ideas for how I could make this actually useful and good. Ideally I want to not only sketch distributed systems things but simple models of programs. Hopefully will have time to play and expand this in to more and more expressive territory soon.

tiny suggestion — use a monospace font for the display of the current time, to stop it from wiggling

You can't control routing yet. Though you don't have to go through a router. The goal is to be able to make your own components with a little "language" (ideally not requiring a bunch of typing). And from that you should be able to have quite a be able to create many different routing options. For real orchestration, yet I have thought about it. I actually don't think it is too hard. Just component types that allow input through the real world and output. Ideas aren't fully fleshed out. It is definitely not designed right now for real world data and its complexity. But definitely not impossible.

is…is this hest?

Lol, I almost just posted it with the words "...Hest at home" lol

hest isn't real, though.

Screenshot 2026-04-19 at 3.57.24 PM.png

Yeah, interaction nets are definitely neat. I am intentionally avoiding general computation here and focusing on simulation. I plan on making everything domain specific to being able to model systems. I'll consider it expressive enough distributed systems wise if you can write raft in it. For more general programs not sure the benchmark yet

this raft?

Yes that raft. Being able to have nodes come and go, see leader election happen etc feels like we've really made a system that can really model distributed systems well

freaking sick, love it

I always wanted to build something similar but for "real world stuff", like a supply chain network, a production line, abstracted as a set of producers, buffers, "workers" etc.

This is awesome. Something feels very nice about seeing data actually move around

Is this a simulation of 3 agents producing PRs that 8 humans need to review? 😂 Just kidding. Or not. As more and more code can be written in near real time, I think we need to invent more strategy game like environments where you can see workers, artifacts and data moving around. What if each of the rectangles were growing with every item coming in? What if you could go there and control them? What if you could build bridges or block paths? @Ivan Reese For stable counter animations: If the font supports tabular figures, enable: font-feature-settings: “tnum”. Otherwise as you suggested: any monospace font if you want that aesthetic :) Speaking of aesthetic: did you by any chance look at my friends RYBitten? https://rybitten.space/

sorry for being late to the party, but this flow of data reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net and Petri-Nets are Turing complete