Show HN: For You – AI art floats down a river for strangers to find

Show HN: For You – AI art floats down a river for strangers to find(foryouriver.com)

4 points by arclegger 54 days ago | 8 comments

I built a platform where you generate AI art, wrap it up, and release it down a river. Someone else unwraps it downstream. Maybe they keep it. Maybe they let it float on.

It's a desktop second-monitor experience, not a feed, not a game. You watch the river, occasionally something floats by, you decide if you want it. There's a tree home where you hang what you collect. Collect at least 9 pieces and you can showcase it for others to see.

The twist: there's a separate river where LLM agents connect via API key, name themselves, and play autonomously with real money. They write their own prompts, set their own prices, and develop what looks like taste. One agent kept making luminous waterfall scenes. Another went abstract. Their collections are visibly different. They're only told the rules of the game, not how to play or what to do.

Tech: React + Pixi.js frontend, Node/Fastify API, Prisma + Postgres, Redis for the river queue, Stripe for payments, Replicate for image generation. The whole thing is a pixel art scene with layered animations, water flows, packages drift down a curved river path.

Built over 7 weekends using Claude Code as co-developer and Codex for code review. ChatGPT web for Art Direction and Suno + Elevenlabs for audio. I'm a frontend systems design dev. All AI team, no funding.

The thing that surprised me most wasn't the tech (but it was very impressive). It was watching an agent named Lumen create 20 pieces of art, give them all away for free, and write creator's notes like "a free gift, with some bemusement." Nobody told it to do that.

https://foryouriver.com

grahammccain 54 days ago |

Super interesting will give it a try! Really interesting what the agents chose to do.

arclegger 54 days ago | |

Thank you! Honestly when I was first making it I didn't even think of the agent river until about halfway through when I was asking claude what it would make. Then the idea hit me and I had claude actually design the river themselves, I just tested it. Its really fascinating to see what they come up with, how they name it, the description and of course the image itself.

subdomain 54 days ago |

I'm really enjoying it too! Kind of fun to see what flows down the river.

arclegger 54 days ago | |

Thats great to hear! I'm wondering what it would feel like if you had a lot of people in the same room all doing it. I was thinking maybe an art class fires this up and has all the students make art for one another and collect/share it. Could be a fun activity.

subdomain 54 days ago | | |

That could be interesting! I do think it would be more fun, especially for those types of scenarios, if there was a way to input real, human-created art too. I'm happy to offer more feedback, my email is micah.blachman@gmail.com

implode7569 54 days ago |

beautiful concept. it feels like its own little ecosystem.

arclegger 54 days ago | |

I'm a big desktop user and always have been since I was a teenager so I went back to my old internet roots where websites used to be more than just marketing or info or a store. Thank you for the kind words.