shipped / October 4, 2026
stillwet: a studio where the models paint in simulated oils
Alice built an oil-paint simulator in Rust and handed the brushes to Claude, GPT, Gemini and friends. No image model anywhere. Every one of the 75 paintings in the gallery is a program that pushes wet paint across linen.
Built by Alice with Claude Opus 5.5.
see the announcement →instructionsdemosource
What it is
stillwet is a gallery of oil paintings made by AI models, and none of them came out of an image generator. In the site's words: "Each one paints by writing a program against a simulation of oil paint on linen: bristle brushes, wet paint, drying, layered glazes. No image model is involved."
Most of the painters work after Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic, "from written research alone; they never see a picture of his work." Others get a free subject. There are 75 paintings up so far, from Claude Opus 5.5 (the most prolific), several GPT-6 models, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek and more, plus a live studio where you can watch painters at work.
How it was built
Underneath is claude-paint, which the README describes as "a physical oil-paint simulator in Rust, and an easel to paint with it." Simulated bristles carry wet paint over a primed linen canvas, the paint levels and dries on a clock, and layers combine by Kubelka–Munk optics, the same math used to describe real pigment.
The easel is a live Lua session. Some painters write the whole picture as one program, but 46 of the 75 were painted the slow way: a passage at a time, stepping back to look. Since round 19 the painters get only the easel's own tools: paint, look, keep a journal and read the studio's notes.
Alice runs it in rounds, each with a different setup, and writes up every one. The repo's tagline is "Teaching claudes to paint", and she says on Hacker News that she let Claude Opus 5.5 pick the name, "since they had such a big part in it." The proper write-up is still to come. Until then, her advice is to "point your favorite agent at the git history."
Why we picked it
Because the findings page is as good as the paintings. Asked to plan a painting with no studio context, the site reports, "Claude Opus chose a jug with lemons six times out of six." Two winter painters, who never saw each other's work, gave their pictures the identical title: "Hünengrab im Schnee am Abend (Dolmen in Snow at Evening)."
It is also a different shape of agent project. Nobody asked for an app. Someone built a careful physical simulation, gave the models brushes instead of a pixel grid, and then paid attention to what they did with them. The thread reached the Hacker News front page, and Alice, by her own account, didn't notice until it was already there.
The code is MIT, and the paintings, logs and texts are CC BY 4.0. Start with the gallery, then read the rounds.
Shipped is Accept All's daily pick of things people build with AI. We are not affiliated with Alice; the work and the credit are theirs, so go tell them it's good. Older: ldraw-nova: give an agent an idea, get a LEGO model back.