Zeus Mode: A Clickable Lightning Storm

Recently, it's been really hot and humid in the UK with temperatures getting up to the 30s.

We had a little bit of respite but the heat is back this week and my fans (yup, with an “s”) are working overtime.

“Okay, fans working overtime... how do we end up at lightning storms?”

A couple weeks back, it got up to 35℃ and as always in the UK, a sustained period of hot weather usually ends with thunderstorms. Apparently it was a really intense night, but I slept through it all. I did see pictures posted online the next day of massive bolts that filled the sky — it looked really pretty but also very ominous. Here's an example.

That sparked (🥁) some creativity in me and got me wanting to create some lightning visuals.

So I built a lightning storm where you can click anywhere to call down lightning, or just sit back and watch.

Here are some screenshots:

You can play with it properly here.

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Most of this was prompting and refining with more prompts, and I was cautious about even putting it here as it didn't feel like something that I could call “mine”. But as AI agents make implementation more frictionless, it does appear like there's going to be a shift in what's deemed valuable in software engineers. It feels like we're going to end up in a place where someone's taste becomes the cog that shapes the product rather than whether something is feasible to do within a space of time.

Having an AI agent to assist me with this meant that the roadblocks between an idea in my mind and a working thing on a canvas mostly flattened out. In the past, those bumps in the process often cost me the burst of energy that had got me wanting to start in the first place; plenty of ideas stopped there, never getting a chance to spring to life.

It's nice to lean on the creative side of coding every now and then, and take a step back from the structure and organisation that comes with coding at work.