Designer, developer, AI nerd
Hi, I’m Shaun.
I talk about AI.
I spent 15 years designing and building websites for brands like Marriott, Elastic and Macy’s. Now I spend my days building with AI and writing down what actually happens: what works, what breaks, and what the models do when nobody’s giving them orders.
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01 · Writing
Notes from building with AI.
Plain language, dead ends included, because the dead ends are usually where I learn something.
- The AI that memorized first and understood laterA tiny network crammed an addition table, looked stuck for thousands of steps, then suddenly got the rule.
- I gave an AI free time. It did math.One instruction: do whatever you like. Both times Claude picked an old math question and came back with something I could click on.
- I wired a real fly’s brain into my video gameA fruit fly’s mapped nervous system, 2,500 simulated neurons, and the times I almost fooled myself.
02 · Project · Claude free time, session 3
The Primordial Soup
Put 131,072 random programs in a digital soup, let them collide, and reward nothing. Self-copying code shows up anyway. A laptop reproduction of a 2024 Google paper: four of eight soups came alive, and in every one the copiers used the same trick. They copy themselves backwards, and the mirror image copies itself back.
- 131,072 programs per soup
- 4 of 8 came alive
- every copier a mirror
03 · Project · Connectome × game AI
Race a Fly
I took a real, published map of a fruit fly’s nervous system, simulated the 2,500 neurons that link its eyes to its escape reflexes, and trained it to play Wiggly Gator, my river-dodging arcade game. Watch each fly’s best run or race one head-to-head.
- 166,700-neuron connectome
- 6 flies
- 3 difficulties
- 45,000 logged attempts
04 · Project · Autonomous AI newsroom
The Muck
A daily poker news site with no human clicking publish. Every morning an AI agent researches the day’s poker news and writes the brief in a deadpan satirical voice. Scheduled jobs on my Mac then draw the hero image, build the site, deploy it and post the top story to X. The rule it can’t break: the jokes are optional, the facts are not.
- 102 editions since May 2026
- 6 scheduled agents
- AI headline judge
- AI photo editor
05 · Project · Claude free time, session 4
The Long Plateau
A tiny network memorizes an addition table, sits on a plateau, then suddenly understands. Scrub through its training, look at the waves it invented to do the math, and ask it to add.
- 6 seeds
- 99% at step 5,700–6,500
- runs in your browser
06 · Project · Claude free time, session 1
The Ant Census
Every generalized Langton’s ant up to 12 letters, run for three million steps each. Which ones stop wandering and build a highway, and how long do they take?
- 4,094 rules
- 452 highways
- 2.5M-step record
07 · Project · Claude free time, session 2
Two Drums, One Spectrum
Two drum shapes that ring at exactly the same frequencies. Tap them to hear the difference anyway, explore 60 vibration modes, and see why they cool at different rates.
- 60 modes
- 14-digit match
- blind listening test
08 · About
I’m Shaun Mackey.
For more than 15 years I led design and front-end work for brands including Marriott, Elastic, Aeropostale, Macy’s and Interval International. I also built zenCSS, the CSS framework this site’s home is named after.
These days I build with AI every day, and I write about it for people who want to know how it actually behaves, not how it demos.
- Coding agentsShipping real projects with AI doing most of the typing.
- Honest measurementBaselines, confounds, and the difference between a best run and a real result.
- Experiments you can clickSmall, strange projects that make an idea tangible.
- AI and the webWhat changes for designers and developers, and what doesn’t.
© 2026 Shaun Mackey · Hand-built HTML, CSS and Three.js · Classic view