That observation became a scrappy raytracer prototype that sat on my disk for years. It worked, barely, and every change broke two other things, so I mostly left it alone.

What finally got it over the line was working on it with AI. Not "the AI wrote it": the idea, the model of the room, and the color decisions are mine. But pair-programming with an agent turned the parts I'd been dreading (porting to TypeScript, a WebGL2 preview that falls back to the exact CPU render, a proper web component, nailing down the determinism guarantees) into afternoons instead of months. For the first time the project was actually fun to tinker with, so I did, a lot.

The result: one sphere in a five-sided room, up to three colored lights. Instead of picking colors from a wheel, you place lights and sample points off the sphere's surface. Click it, or drag a line or circle across it and sample N points along the shape. The palette stays coherent for the same reason the tennis ball's did: every color is the same world seen from a different angle. Mirror walls act as virtual light sources, which is the tabletop bouncing warm light back onto the ball.

The API is deliberately scoped to exactly that: one sphere, lights, and simple sample shapes. It's all I needed for generating palettes, and building a direct-manipulation UI for even this small world (draggable lights, shapes that roll onto the back of the sphere like a trackball) was already plenty of complexity.

The library is ~6 kB gzipped, zero dependencies, DOM-free, and deterministic: same scene, same colors, and a sampled color matches its rendered pixel bit-for-bit (all shading in linear RGB, sRGB only at the 8-bit boundary).

Playground: https://meodai.github.io/ray-color/

code: https://github.com/meodai/ray-color

Happy to answer anything about the shading model, the sampling API, or what it was like dragging a years-old prototype into shape with an agent.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071076

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

beauty is in the eye of the beholder

though going through every comment to promote it feels a bit… unnecessary

The butcher is un charcutier, and the shop is une boucherie. La charcuterie refers to the food itself, usually cured or prepared meats (pork, cooked, smoked, dried, etc.). So the name works the same way it does in English.