June 9, 2026
Code, chaos, and a glitchy plot twist
Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design and art
A beloved art-coding toolkit sparks praise, language fights, and even Mac glitch panic
TLDR: thi.ng is a long-running open-source collection of creative coding tools that has grown into hundreds of projects over nearly two decades. Commenters praised it like a legend, but also kicked off a mini fight over its shift from Clojure to TypeScript—and one user stole the show by reporting wild Mac screen glitches.
A giant open-source art and design project called thi.ng is having a main-character moment, and the comments section immediately turned it into a deliciously nerdy soap opera. The project itself is huge: started by Karsten Schmidt, running since 2006, and now sprawling across roughly 350 mini-projects for creative coding, design, visuals, and experimental tools. In plain English: it’s less one app and more a massive box of digital Lego pieces for artists and makers.
But the real fireworks came from the crowd. One fan went full love letter, declaring “thi-ng/geom is my favorite Clojure project,” basically crowning it a cult classic. Then the debate engine revved up: why was it built with Clojure, a niche programming language loved by enthusiasts, and why do newer pieces seem to be moving to TypeScript, the more mainstream web-friendly option? That sparked the classic internet subtext: Is the old cool language being replaced? Is the new one just more practical? Nobody threw chairs, but the vibe was absolutely “language war, polite edition.”
Meanwhile, one commenter skipped the philosophy entirely and dropped a plot twist: the site itself was allegedly glitching hard on a MacBook M3, complete with a YouTube bug video. So yes, while some people were admiring thi.ng as a visionary long-running art toolbox, others were asking the internet’s eternal question: “Very cool, but why is my screen melting?”
Key Points
- •Thi.ng is an open-source computational design project made up of about 350 sub-projects, with at least half still actively maintained.
- •The project was created and has been maintained by Karsten Schmidt since 2006, with support from a small group of contributors.
- •Thi.ng began as an internal toolkit for work projects and experimental design research, then expanded as open-source tooling for computational design was limited.
- •The collection includes more than 200 bundled examples with its largest projects and also serves educational purposes through teaching and workshops.
- •Its current primary development focus is data-driven, functional tooling for TypeScript and browser technologies, while also supporting Clojure, ClojureScript, C11, and Houdini VEX.