Web Toys & Generative Art

Gource 3D-ish alive — and still actively maintained

Andrew Caudwell · v0.56, March 2026 · ~13k stars · desktop OpenGL app / video renderer — not a browser thing

The famous one. The directory tree blooms outward as a glowing organic structure; developers buzz around as labeled sprites shooting beams at files they touch; the whole repo's history plays back as a time-lapse you export to video for the conference talk. It does not render code, and it does not run in a browser — but it's the genuinely-maintained elder statesman of "git history as spectacle," and the visual everyone pictures when they hear "code visualization."

gource.io · github.com/acaudwell/Gource

code_swarm 2D effectively dead

Michael Ogawa · ~2008 · Java/Processing desktop app, renders to video · original lived on Google Code (gone); the rictic and VIDILabs forks are quiescent

The thing that predates Gource and inspired a lot of it: commits visualized as an organic swarm — files glow when touched, authors orbit their work, everything decays. It was a 2008 sensation, the original hosting went down with Google Code, and the surviving GitHub forks are dormant and painful to build today. A genre ancestor; not something you can run on a Tuesday.

github.com/rictic/code_swarm · VIDILabs/code_swarm

gitlogue · gitVis3D 2D / 3D small, dormant

unhappychoice (gitlogue) · kofujimura (gitVis3D)

The long tail of git-history toys: gitlogue replays a repo's history as a cinematic typing animation in a terminal; gitVis3D is a small 3D repo visualization with little traction. Listed for completeness; neither is a tool you'd reach for, neither renders code at scale.

Codeology 3D / WebGL dead — endpoint refuses connections

Braintree · ~2014, with the artist Marpi · ~511 stars · codeology.braintreepayments.com returns ECONNREFUSED; repo archived June 2021

Type a GitHub username and a repo, and Codeology grows a unique, beautiful WebGL "creature" from it — language mix drives the form, size drives the scale. It was a corporate art piece (Braintree's), it was lovely, and it's gone: the hosting refuses connections, the repo is a read-only archive. Marpi keeps a static showcase of the visuals at demo.marpi.pl/codeology/ — but that's a portfolio page, not the working tool. The clearest single example of "this genre link-rots."

github.com/project-codeology/codeology (archived) · Marpi showcase (static)

CodeFlower 2D demo loads, but it can't ingest a repo anymore

François Zaninotto (redotheweb) · ~2014 · ~700 stars, ~7 commits total · D3 force-directed layout of a repo's files

Files as leaves on a wobbling force-directed tree, sized by lines of code — a clean little D3 piece that gets cited a lot. The demo page at redotheweb.com/CodeFlower still renders, but it can't point at a GitHub URL: you have to run cloc locally, build a JSON, and host your own copy. So it's effectively a static showcase plus a small library, not a usable "show me this repo" tool.

github.com/fzaninotto/CodeFlower · demo

GitHub Next — "Repo Visualization" 2D · SVG stale GitHub Action

githubocto / GitHub Next; Amelia Wattenberger's "Visualizing a codebase" · 2021 · ~1.3k stars, last release v0.9.1 April 2023 · a CI action, not a hosted site

The circle-packing diagram you've seen on a hundred READMEs: directories nest as circles, files are dots sized by lines and colored by type. It's not a website — it's a GitHub Action you add to a repo's workflow, which commits an SVG back. Wattenberger's accompanying essay is the best short writeup of "why a stable, type-colored map of a repo is useful." The Action itself hasn't been touched since 2023.

githubnext.com/projects/repo-visualization · github.com/githubocto/repo-visualizer

GitHub Skyline 3D · STL web app shut down — CLI lives on

GitHub · skyline.github.com now reads "the lights are out for now"; replaced by the gh skyline CLI extension · your contribution graph as a 3D-printable model

The official one: your year of green squares, extruded into a little skyline you could 3D-print as a desk trophy. The website is dead; the gh-skyline CLI extension still generates STL files, and there are community forks. It's the contribution calendar — not the repo — but it's the most-recognized "GitHub thing in 3D," so worth knowing it exists and that the web version is gone.

GithubCity · git-city 3D alive

honzaap (GithubCity, ~1.3k stars, Three.js) · srizzon (git-city, 2026 launch, pixel-art) · both openable today

Two community takes on "your GitHub profile as a city": honzaap/GithubCity builds a tidy Three.js metropolis from your contribution data; srizzon/git-city (a 2026 launch that got a press cycle) does a pixel-art isometric version. Charming, alive, and — to be clear one more time — driven by your commit calendar, not by any repo's source.

git-of-theseus charts alive

Erik Bernhardsson · ~2.9k stars, maintained · Python CLI; runs against a local clone; outputs stacked-area PNGs

Not spatial, not a browser app, but the best single answer to "how much of this codebase's original code is still here?" — a stacked-area chart of code survival over time, by cohort. The kind of repo-scale insight glyph3d-js could surface spatially; worth knowing as a reference for "what questions do people actually ask about a whole codebase's history."

github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus

GitHut 2.0 charts alive

madnight · madnight.github.io/githut · language popularity across all of GitHub, from the public BigQuery archive

Cross-GitHub language statistics — pull requests, pushes, stars by language over time. Up, maintained, and entirely about the aggregate, not any one repo. Included because it's the survivor of the "GitHub stats dashboard" wave and people conflate it with code visualization.

CodeBoarding Mermaid + markdown alive

CodeBoarding · v0.11.0, April 2026 · MIT; CLI via pip/pipx, VS Code extension, GitHub Action · has visualized 800+ open-source repos

The more substantial LLM-era tool: static analysis plus a model (OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini / Bedrock / Ollama) producing architecture docs — Mermaid diagrams plus markdown walkthroughs — written into a .codeboarding/ directory in the repo. Free, open, actively developed, and aimed at "onboard a human to this codebase" — the same goal as a whole-repo renderer, approached as prose-and-diagrams rather than rendered space.

codeboarding.org · github.com/CodeBoarding/CodeBoarding

The plumbing: Repomix · gitingest · repo2txt non-visual alive

various · 2023–2026

Not visualizers — packers. These flatten a repo into a single LLM-friendly text blob (respecting .gitignore, counting tokens, etc.), and they're frequently the first step in a "repo → diagram" pipeline. Worth knowing they exist; worth knowing they're not the thing — they're how you feed the thing.

code-maat · code-forensics · "Your Code as a Crime Scene" 2D / data alive · OSS

Adam Tornhill · code-maat (Clojure) mines git history → CSV; code-forensics (Node) wraps it with d3 visualizations; the book is in its 2nd edition (Pragmatic Bookshelf) · free; the productized form is CodeScene

The open foundation under CodeScene: extract hotspots, change coupling, and code ownership from a repo's git log, then visualize them — classically as enclosure / circle-packing diagrams. code-maat gives you the metrics; code-forensics gives you a d3 front end; the book gives you the theory. It's not spatial-3D, but it's the most influential body of "what's interesting about a whole codebase's history, and how do you show it" — directly relevant to anything glyph3d-js does with churn, ownership, or evolution overlays.

github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat · the book (2nd ed.)