Why I Put a Floating Orb in My IDE
Everything is free now, so why not a floating orb in my IDE
A developer explains why they added a floating orb screensaver to the center of their custom IDE. The orb provides a relaxing visual break from code, and the IDE itself is built with agents, terminals, and custom keybindings. The left and right lanes are static, but the middle is where the action happens—and the orb is useless yet addictive to watch.
And it’s useless - yet addictive - to stare at it.
- rollulus
The orb is free yet comes at a cost. When I wrote the equivalent of the orb 25 years ago I had to go through the book “Real-Time Rendering” by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Eric Haines, the first edition with the chameleon. I remember the smell of the book. I learned that 3D projection was not mostly trigonometry (as I believed) but instead “just” multiplications and an occasional division, mind blown! I learned while skimming through the various chapters in the book how little I knew and how much there was to explore, creating a sense of excitement and craving to understand and implement algorithms from shadow volumes to spherical harmonics, and acquire first all the mathematical prerequisites. And I had the rewarding feeling of accomplishment when my orb was rendering.
Now all of that is gone, if you choose so, and what’s left is brainrot and the equivalent of doom scrolling.
- WD-42
Everything is free, except HTTP requests apparently.
- ryuuseijin
I noticed during my own automatic programming [1] that although code is free (or more free, at least compared to before coding agents) understanding is not. Instead of investing time to understand and master someone else's software tools, I now still need to understand and master what I build for myself, which can be a lot of fun if you build up your understanding from scratch while building out the tools.