House
A house needs a free grass or sand tile with land on at least three sides and no other house directly next to it. Every house after the first stands at most three tiles from a house or path.
Day 38 · 5 Nov 2026 · autumn
One tile a day.
A pixel island in a public GitHub repository. Every morning at 08:47 a Claude routine adds exactly one tile, writes one line of lore and makes exactly one commit.
Timelapse · the real island
Day000
28 Sep 2026
Scroll to replay every day since the sandbank.
Day 0
A sandbank in the open sea
Nothing but water – and in the middle of it, a small sandbank. Tomorrow, the island begins.
World rules
Nothing is random. Everything waits for something.
A house needs land around it, a harbour needs a coast, a library waits for three houses. The routine can only choose among what the rules allow – so the island grows like a place, not like noise.
Harbour
The harbour needs a sandy coast tile, three houses and a jetty within three tiles. There is only one.
Library
The library needs at least three houses and free grass directly next to a path. There is only one.
Lighthouse
The lighthouse needs rock on the coast and at least one house for its keeper. There is only one.
Windmill
A windmill needs free grass with two fields within three tiles. At most two.
Ruin
Ruins of an older time surface on forest, rock or grass at least five tiles from any house, once the island has thirty tiles of land. At most two.
How it grows
Grown by a routine, one commit at a time.
No human places the tiles. A scheduled Claude routine does – inside a strict frame of code, tests and continuous integration. Everything it does is public.
- 08:47
The routine wakes up
A Claude routine starts in the cloud, every day at 08:47 in Heilbronn.
- 01
Is today already done?
If there is a commit for today it stops. Running twice changes nothing.
- 02
Read the island
npm run day -- plan lists every legal change, the recent lore and a suggestion.
- 03
Choose and write
Claude picks the change that tells the best story and writes one line of lore.
- 04
The rules decide
The code checks the choice. An illegal tile is simply impossible.
- 05
Exactly one commit
A pull request with one commit – once CI is green it is merged into main.
- 06
The site grows too
The merge redeploys this website. The island you see is the commit of today.
Today's commit
$ npm run day -- status { "day": 38, "done": true } $ git log -1 --format=%s Day 38: The path runs on past the well # one tile · one lore line · one commit
The routine's instructions are a file in the repository – versioned, reviewable, open.
Logbook
A chronicle, one line per day.
Every change gets a line of lore. Read backwards, the lines become the island's history.
- DAY 038The path runs on past the well
5 Nov 2026 · The path from the well runs one step further south, so that on wet evenings the islanders can carry their buckets home dry-footed. - DAY 037A beach for the cat in the south-east
4 Nov 2026 · A low beach rises in the south-east corner, and the grey cat is first to walk its wet edge, leaving a line of small prints. - DAY 036Sand below the south-west rocks
3 Nov 2026 · Below the lighthouse rocks a new strip of sand rises, and the south-west point grows gently wider against the November swell. - DAY 035Rune, the island's first fisher
2 Nov 2026 · Rune moves into the north shore house beside Ilka and rows the blue boat out at dawn, coming home with the island's first catch. - DAY 034A cat on the south-east shore
1 Nov 2026 · A grey cat turns up on the south-east shore one cold morning, sniffs at the boat, and decides the island will do. - DAY 033The first path to the well
31 Oct 2026 · Daily trips for water wear a narrow path from the north shore house to the well, and the sand there is now packed firm by footsteps.
Chapters
How it works, in four short stories.
CHAPTER 01 · 3 MIN
Why one tile a day?
A world that is only allowed to change once a day – and why that makes it worth watching.
CHAPTER 02 · 5 MIN
How the island decides
Twenty rules, a director with a sense of drama, and why a library has to wait for three houses.
CHAPTER 03 · 5 MIN
A day in the life of the routine
What happens between 08:47 and the merge: idempotency, one pull request and exactly one commit.
CHAPTER 04 · 4 MIN
Pixels, palettes and seasons
Hand-drawn sprites, soft coastlines from hard tiles, dithered seas – and the same island in 3D.
Archipelago
One island is a mechanic. Three are an archipelago.
This island grows by its own rules. Two sister islands grow by other forces – the real weather in Heilbronn and the wishes of strangers. Same routine, same one commit a day.
