I start from rules rather than features, and I do not move them once they are written. Every project here carries its own set, in its own repository, in plain words, so that anybody can hold the thing to what it said it would be.
Four of them turn up every time.
Nothing invented. If something prints a number at you, somebody measured it, and the date is next to it. Not "fast": 24 seconds, on 26 August, with eleven volunteers on the network.
Nothing is for sale. No advertising, no subscription, no shop, no scarcity, no scores, no streaks. If a design only works because somebody is anxious about missing out, it is not a design, it is a lever.
The failure I hunt is the silent one. Not the crash, which tells you. The result that comes back perfectly valid and perfectly wrong. Most of the machinery I end up building exists to make that kind of failure visible: written tables that two separate implementations must both answer to, checks that fail loudly rather than degrade quietly, and a self-test that says in yellow when it could only prove that a file agrees with itself.
Say the price out loud. Every choice costs somebody something. It goes on the screen, in the same size as the promise.
SIXFINGERS · sixfingers.vercel.app
Live. August 2026.
A website pretending to be a computer from 2001. You type a phrase. Somewhere a stranger's graphics card wakes up. About a minute later, six pictures arrive as a sealed folder on your desktop, and you have to knock on it three times before it gives.
No account, no key, nothing to install, nothing to pay. It runs on the AI Horde, a few hundred people lending their graphics cards to strangers for nothing, so the site asks for six pictures and then stops.
The name is the joke: the models that draw these got composition right and anatomy wrong. Before you admire a picture, count the fingers.
What is interesting about it, from the inside: it has no server and no build step, and it still has a community. The catalogue of picture machines is a public repository anybody can propose to, a robot answers every proposal in about a minute with the reasons it passed or failed, and the wall of what people are making is compiled by a scheduled job into a single static file so that nobody's browser ever has to ask GitHub anything.
Two pieces of it are written up properly if you want to see how it is made:
- The word guard · a small, measured defence against the site ever printing a racist word in its own chrome. Six passes, a lookalike-letter table derived from the Unicode security data, two tiers so ambiguous words are held for a person rather than refused by a machine, and 297 written test cases of which 191 must pass, because a guard that refuses somebody's real name does more harm than a word that gets through.
- The open shelf · the public catalogue, the rules a picture machine has to meet, and the checker anybody can run before proposing one.
More is coming, and it will be listed here as it ships rather than promised beforehand. If you want to know when, the best signal is this page.
The AI Horde carries 163 image models, and every one of them has somebody running it right now. Almost nobody has an opinion about which ones are worth a minute of your life.
Working that out is not a programming job, it is a taste job. Try one, time it, say what actually comes back, and the catalogue is open: sixfingers-sources.