2026-11-07 · ~7 min
My portfolio has ants now, and they eat the copy
A small game on a professional site, built with no canvas and no framework, where the enemy steals the very letters you came to read.
I had no game on my portfolio. For someone who keeps telling students the interesting part of software is the behavior, that was a little embarrassing. So I gave the bugs a home. This site now has ants.
The ant is already in the status bar. Click it, or open the terminal at the bottom of the page, type nest, and press Enter. The terminal command does the same thing. If you want to see it listed, type help first: nest sits next to reveal the ant colony.
Click the ant, and an anthill turns up in a random empty patch of whatever page you are on, high or low, and the colony goes to work on the copy. If you are already reading this note, the button below does the same thing without a trip to the status bar.
The enemy in this game wants the sentence you were halfway through reading.
What the ants actually do
Three scouts leave the hill first. The first takes the closest letter. The second takes a target on the opposite side of the mound, so a hill on the right sends it left. The third takes the most spread-out remaining spot. All three stay in view. Later scouts stay off a block that already has a trail or a scout on the way. Each one wanders to a letter, picks it up, and walks it home. The letter it takes is the real glyph, in its real font, color and underline, and the space it leaves stays exactly where it was, so the paragraph never reflows. You just watch it get gappier.
A scout that makes it home lays a scent trail. A scout squashed before that first letter is home leaves no trail at all. Workers follow trails five to a line, filled in turn so no trail starves, and a heading in a big font needs a crew of two or three to lift. A trail fades when its patch is empty or after ninety seconds, and each retired trail sends its own worker to find the next patch, so several spent patches do not leave one line. The next scout looks nearby first, and the colony holds one trail for every two ants, so the number keeps climbing. Once the colony passes eight, soldiers hatch: bigger, quieter in color than a worker, and worth two hits.
Every other letter feeds the queen in the sidebar, who lays eggs. The rest goes into two storerooms, and when they fill up a builder ant walks out and raises a mini hill somewhere else on the page, sometimes below the fold; the first two grow near the main hill, and later ones spread out. Its mound thins as it takes hits, and when a mound falls the stores cap drops with it. A mound that is only hurt heals one hit at a time. Guards stay on the nearest trail, even a far one, until it disappears, then return to their mound, and flyers ignore trails entirely and pinch letters from anywhere. Knock a guarded hill and the mound and its guards flash; the guards come home to defend it, and you swat them all before the mound splits open, ready for five clicks. A colony that has taken twenty letters stops to worship, then fifty, then a rising count: the queen crawls out of the hill and walks to a clear patch near it, every ant on the page comes toward her, the far ones turn back to their trails when it ends, the sidepanel pulses with the news, and a next worship bar shows how close the next one is. The target rises and falls with the living colony, so a small colony worships sooner, and the queen dances once she reaches the patch.
You fight back with four colony tools in the panel: Squash and Wipe on 1 and 2, and Bait and Seal with their names on the tiles. Links, mute, pause and restore sit in the row below, with Links still on 3 and its label reading Links locked or Links unlocked. Squash and Wipe lock every page link, not just the reading pane, so a missed ant does not send you to another page. A locked link says so in a small notice and offers the Links tool. (I learned that one by clicking an ant, missing, and landing on /projects. Several times.) Wipe across a scent trail and it snaps into two pieces: the ants scatter, then take the nearest trail with room or head back to the hill. A squashed ant flattens under a quick ring, and a pile of ants goes together under one click. Links hands the page back, but following a page link asks first: leaving ends the colony. There is bait, a hill seal on a cooldown, a restore button that asks first, then puts every letter back, moves the main mound, keeps the ants, and scrolls to the new hill, and a mute button, because sound is off until you ask for it; the unmute button pulses when the colony opens, then settles on hover, focus, click or after eight seconds.
No win screen, no game over
The endings were the part I argued with myself about longest. A portfolio is not an arcade, and a big YOU WIN banner on a résumé page felt wrong. So there isn't one, and there is no reserve left to make one out of. If the last ant is gone, the queen sends one scout back out and the colony carries on. The page can run out too, and the colony still carries on: the queen sends another scout and the ants take whatever is left. Closing the Nest puts every letter back. A refresh or a move to another page is a reset too: the panel closes, the colony clears, and the launcher waits in the status bar. The colony lives on the page where you opened it.
Built on the same stack as everything else
No canvas, no game library, no framework. The nest in the sidebar is a grid of Braille characters, each cell eight dots, colored by the theme's own tokens, the same trick as the bread on the home page. The four meters are character bars that fill their cards, and the activity log shares a line with the explained link under the nest. The ants are tiny inline SVGs made of round dots, two leg frames swapping. Every color comes from the active flavor of GRAIN, so the game is blue on baguette and gold on brioche without me writing a line for either. It is one plain JavaScript file. The sound is synthesized in the same file: a few oscillators and one noise buffer, no audio files.
That was the point of building it at all. A design system that only renders documents is half a claim. This one also renders a small ecosystem that steals from the documents.
Where the time actually went
Not into the fun parts. Into traffic. The first colony read like a centipede, ants nose to tail. Then every ant piled onto the first trail and ignored the second. Then two trails crossed and the whole colony gridlocked, each ant politely waiting for the one in front of it, forever. The fix there was letting ants only queue behind ants on their own trail heading their own way, plus a timeout for the stubborn ones. Later I gave each trail two lanes and drew the scout's route as one soft cubic with a jagged little walk in it, because a trail should look walked, not sampled. Real ants solved that a long time ago. It took me a few evenings.
Claude did most of the typing, which will surprise nobody who has read how I work. The calls were mine: ants that take real letters, gaps that never reflow, no announced ending, and the bit where a professional site hides a game behind a small ant and a word you have to know to type.
What I have not earned yet
It has been played by me, a preview browser, and a small browser suite, and that is the whole test group. Balance is a guess: the costs of mini hills, the trail target, how fast the queen breeds. I have watched a guard patrol beside a trail since, and the first version could get stuck on its own mound; that is fixed now. On a phone it needs a rethink, because squashing an ant with a thumb on a narrow column is a different game, and the stray ant has nowhere to lead because the launcher hides there. I have not built that one.
But if you are reading this on the site, the ant is in the status bar, and the terminal still takes one word. Nest. The copy you just read is the food. If a single ant crosses the page later, when the Nest is closed, follow it. It is the same animated ant as the colony, legs and all, and it knows the way back. Click one and it runs down the page, along the status bar and into the launcher, rather than flying there. It will not cross again in that tab. If you leave it alone, it walks off the nearest edge after fourteen to nineteen seconds. If you would rather not wait, the terminal takes stray.
The judgment is human. The typing, by design, is not.