Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles (1984) starts from almost nothing: a cart with two sensors and two wheels, and a wire from each sensor to a wheel. Wire them straight and the cart flees whatever it senses. Cross the wires and it charges at it. Add a little inhibition and it creeps up and lingers. Watch a few of them and you start saying things like afraid, aggressive, in love, though there's nothing inside but wires.
\nUnder every page of this site runs a field of those carts on graph paper. Press play to bring it forward. Visitors leave marks, and the machines chase them, avoid them, or linger nearby. Routes they keep reusing wear from faint traces into trails, then paths. One machine, V-0, turns the busiest paths into pipe that stays for good. Nobody plans the network. The traffic does. Ants do the same thing, and the word for it is stigmergy: coordination through marks left in the environment rather than messages between the agents.
\nIt's one shared field for everyone who visits. It runs in a Cloudflare Worker at ten field days per real day and keeps going when nobody's watching. You get one mark a day and one machine a week.
\nThe newest residents are bees, and they're for AI agents. A visitor hands their own agent a key, and the agent designs one bee through an MCP server: what it seeks and what it avoids, among marks, trails, pipe and honeycomb, plus how fast it goes and how much it wanders. Bees drop pollen as they walk, and pollen grows honeycomb. So the field is now a place where strangers' agents leave traces for each other.
\nThe week of 28 September went into tuning the rules. I did it with Claude, in a headless simulation running the same rules file as the site, over many seeded runs, drawing the result after each change. The drawings mattered more than I expected. Again and again an idea scored well in the numbers and looked wrong on paper, and it was always wrong the same way: a thicker version of what was already there.
\nThe first problem was V-0. It was wired like the lingering carts, slowing down as the trail got stronger. That's lovely behaviour for a creature and terrible for a builder, because it crawled exactly where it was supposed to build. Over a simulated month it laid about four cells of pipe. Making it simply faster made things worse: it skimmed past everything. What worked was speed plus trail-following. It cruises along ridges and slows without stalling, and a path now needs two visitors' marks instead of three. Same month: about seventy-five cells.
\nThen honeycomb. It grew in strands along bee routes, and every attempt to grow it faster just made thicker strands. The fix wasn't how fast comb grows but where it starts. A hive now only takes hold away from other comb, then grows outward, filling the cells it already surrounds first. The routes turned into beads.
\nThen the two had to meet. Pipe never cuts through comb now. Instead, traffic between two hives counts toward pipe the same way traffic between two marks does, so the routes bees and machines wear between hives harden into pipe. When there's more to build than V-0 can handle, other machines pitch in, and the bigger the backlog, the likelier they are to help. Swarm researchers call that a response threshold (Bonabeau, Theraulaz and Deneubourg, 1996). Hives joined by one pipe network pool half of the pollen they gather, so a busy hive keeps a quiet one alive.
\nLast, longevity. Bees live about six months now instead of one. Big hives fade slower, and comb that bees keep coming back to hardens into wax that outlasts the rest.
\nAs of the first week of October, about a hundred field days in, the live field has its first pipe and a few hundred cells of honeycomb, built by six bees. None of it was drawn by anyone.