I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where LLMs are genuinely useful on the web, beyond speed or convenience. What about playfulness?
For a long time, expressive web graphics felt like the kind of thing you admired from a distance. They were often too bespoke, too framework-bound, or too time-consuming to adapt into an ordinary publishing workflow. Radiant Shaders, from Paul Bakaus, feels like a compelling counterexample: a collection of standalone, embeddable shaders that invite experimentation rather than gate it behind a complex stack.
Paul’s post, Carving Shaders Out of Claude Code, is worth reading not just because the results are beautiful, but because it shows a mode of working with LLMs that feels creatively healthy. Generative in the older sense of the word: opening up more room to explore, iterate, and discover forms that might not have emerged otherwise.
And in the spirit of the view-source web, it was simple to point an LLM (Codex in my case) at Paul’s MIT-licensed repo and say:
I want to build a WordPress block that uses the shaders from https://github.com/pbakaus/radiant as backgrounds.
Let’s offer the same customizability as the gallery in terms of colors and quantatitive sliders.
It worked almost right away, and it’s on Github. Then I polished on it, added more ways to customize the colours (including your block theme’s colours), and had fun trying them all out!
Here’s to a web with playfulness. Enjoy the examples below!
Flow Field
A gentle place to start. This one has movement without aggression. It feels like the page is breathing.
Kinetic Grid
A more architectural kind of motion. It turns the page into a surface under tension.
Chladni Resonance
The appeal here is that it feels both ornamental and physical, like math becoming texture.
Bioluminescence
This is the mood piece. It makes the web feel less like a stack of documents and more like an environment.
Event Horizon
And then the reminder that playfulness does not have to mean smallness. Sometimes it means following an idea much further than seems reasonable.
If this sort of thing interests you, start with Paul’s essay, then browse radiant-shaders.com. It is one of the better examples I’ve seen lately of LLM-assisted work making the web feel a little more strange, expressive, and alive.