changelog

Web

The Atlas: A Galaxy Around a Black Hole

Rebuilt the Atlas as a WebGL galaxy map around a black hole with real gravitational lensing. Every project, album, and piece of writing is a named star you can hover, click, or zoom toward, and clicking a star's title opens the same details.

The home page now reaches it through a wormhole: the page bends into a lensed tunnel and opens onto the Atlas. Browsers without WebGL2 still get the classic Atlas.

macOS

Cerebro: Public Beta for macOS

Released the Cerebro public beta: mission control for AI agents, as a native Mac app. A Conductor plans the work, delegates to Claude and Codex agents, follows their handoffs, and asks before it crosses a line you set. Agents, workflows, and terminals share one surface.

Version 0.1.0 is signed and notarized, runs on macOS 14 or newer on Apple silicon, and works with the Claude Code or Codex CLI you already have.

Knicks Knacks

Sector Zero: A Cinematic Opening

Gave Sector Zero a proper front door. The new cinematic opening asks you to choose your course: explore the persistent galaxy, or play the legacy campaign of 40 missions across eight sectors.

The companion site got the same treatment, with a visual tour of the six ways to fight, from space combat and boarding actions to turret defense.

Web

Job Toast: Interview Prep

Added a Prep tab to every job in Job Toast. It generates likely interview questions from the job description for free, and on Pro, AI drafts answers that you can edit before saving.

Obsidian

Brain Atlas 0.2: A WebGL2 Renderer

Moved Brain Atlas to a WebGL2 renderer on desktop in version 0.2. The brain looks exactly the same (a pixel-diff check proves it), but idle rotation now uses about 70% less CPU. Canvas2D stays as the automatic fallback on mobile.

Version 0.2.2 followed community bug reports. The atlas now respects Obsidian's Excluded files setting, signal pulses are back in the new renderer, and dragging turns the brain in the direction you expect.

Web

Regexplain: A Terminal Workbench

Rebuilt Regexplain as a terminal-style workbench. The homepage now carries permanent copy and five worked examples, so the tool explains itself before any JavaScript runs, and search engines see more than a loading shell.

Under the hood, the syntax maps are safer, and a stale AI response is now ignored instead of replacing a newer answer.

Knicks Knacks

Sector Zero: A Persistent Galaxy

Started turning Sector Zero into one continuous galaxy with consequences. Faction standing now changes prices, greetings, and whether a trader will deal with you at all, and the simulation runs on a fixed timestep.

The galaxy map is becoming the game's source of truth: saves persist, routes and travel have real costs, and encounters launch from where you actually are. This part is still in active development.

Web

GalAtlas: A Cinematic Atlas of the Cosmos

Launched GalAtlas, a cinematic 3D web atlas of exoplanets and the cosmos. You fly from a single rocky world out through its planetary system to the Milky Way and the cosmic web beyond, with real catalog data, discovery timelines, and habitability readouts layered over a full-bleed WebGL stage.

Followed the launch with a presentation-layer redesign that lets the 3D be the hero. The stage now runs edge to edge while filters, the discovery timeline, and the detail panels recede into invoked drawers, a bottom-sheet timeline peek, and progressively disclosed sections, so the chrome only appears when you reach for it. Built with Vite, React, TypeScript, and react-three-fiber, and deployed on Cloudflare.

Library

El Form: Themeable, Tailwind-Free AutoForm

Gave El Form's AutoForm a real theming system. The shipped styles are now hand-authored, CSS-variable–tokenized, and wrapped in a cascade layer — Tailwind-free, so the components style themselves in any project with no Tailwind required. Added a theme prop (default / minimal / dark), a classNames slots API for bring-your-own styling that always wins the cascade, and live, interactive theme previews in the docs.

Web

Polis Atlas: An Interactive Atlas of Political Power

Launched Polis Atlas, an interactive atlas of political power. A spectrum maps 50 ideologies from total state to no state, and a 3D globe classifies every country by its system of government with 18 real-world statistics layered on top. Built with React, TypeScript, Three.js, and Vite.

Library

El Form: An Interactive Playground in the Docs

Added a live Playground and inline, editable code sandboxes throughout the El Form docs, so you can run AutoForm and useForm examples directly in the browser instead of copy-pasting. Part of a broader push to make the library easy for both humans and AI agents to pick up — alongside machine-readable docs (llms.txt) and an MCP server that gives coding assistants accurate El Form knowledge.

Library

El Form: React Hook Form Parity + a TypeScript Speed Win

Pushed El Form closer to a drop-in React Hook Form alternative: a useWatch hook for reactive value subscriptions, a useFieldArray hook for dynamic arrays with stable keys, and the missing formState fields (isSubmitted, isSubmitSuccessful, submitCount, plus isValidating and a reactive dirtyFields), along with mode: "onTouched" and an opt-in reValidateMode.

At the same time I reworked the Path<T> types so they instantiate roughly 7.8× less at depth — El Form now type-checks faster than React Hook Form on realistic nested schemas, while keeping its selector-based, minimal-re-render core.

Web

Atlas: Explore My Work as a Galaxy Map

Added /atlas, a galaxy-map way to explore my work. Projects cluster into hubs you can fly through on an interactive 3D star map — complete with a left project rail and per-project models — as an exploratory alternative to the standard list view. Built with three.js and react-three-fiber.

The same stretch brought a broader site refresh: per-project detail pages with JSON-LD structured data and an llms.txt for better search and LLM discovery, a fully keyboard-accessible atlas that respects reduced-motion preferences, and project media converted from GIFs to hover-to-play MP4 for faster loads.

Obsidian

Brain Atlas: Obsidian Plugin

Released Brain Atlas, an Obsidian community plugin that turns a vault into an animated 3D anatomical brain. Notes become clustered regions, wikilinks become neural pathways, and the graph stays fully native inside Obsidian.

Updated Brain Atlas to v0.1.5 after early community feedback from folder-heavy and frontmatter-heavy vaults. The plugin now has frontmatter value mappings for existing taxonomies like type:wiki=source, direct region mappings like type:person=temporal, folder region mappings for vaults organized by directories, and a Classification report that explains why notes landed in each brain region.

The release also adds label-density guardrails to prevent dense note labels from turning into visual noise, a DAYLIGHT palette, optional lower-idle-CPU performance presets, and seeded local test vaults for checking how the atlas behaves across different vault organization styles.

macOS

Cerebro: macOS Agent Workspace

Building Cerebro, a native macOS multi-agent workspace for coordinating provider-backed coding agents. The current interface centers agent operations, workflows, audit context, and a galaxy-style command surface in a single desktop app.

Obsidian

Cerebro Mycelium: Obsidian Plugin

Released Cerebro Mycelium, an Obsidian community plugin that renders a vault as a living fungal network. Notes become soft kind-clusters, wikilinks become curved hyphae, and recently edited notes glow as fruiting bodies.

macOS

Throttle v1.0.0

Released Throttle, a macOS menu bar app and WidgetKit widget for tracking Claude Max and Codex Pro usage limits. It keeps session, five-hour, and weekly quota windows visible without opening either service in a browser.

Claude Code

Claude Skills: A Marketplace for the PR Workflow

Published Claude Skills, a personal marketplace of Claude Code skills for the pull request workflow. /pr-review runs AI-assisted reviews that check GraphQL and Prisma contracts, /pr-respond works through review comments, and /push runs a quality-gated push pipeline.

The skills detect frontend and backend stacks on their own, so they work in any project with no per-project config.

Knicks Knacks

Sector Zero: New Playable Modes

Added three new playable modes to the Sector Zero game including survival mode and cooperative multiplayer. The procedural generation system for planet surfaces is still being refined.

Agile Anarchy: What's Left

A postmortem on process worship and what actually ships software. Published on Medium. Explores the gap between agile theory and the reality of small teams moving fast.

Knicks Knacks

Multiplayer Support

Building co-op mode for up to 4 players per session. Planning WebSocket-based sync with client-side prediction.

El Form v1.0

Dynamic form builder with drag-and-drop, conditional logic, and real-time validation. Built with React, TypeScript, and Zustand.

© Nichalas Barnes 2026
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