Coding a Brick Tower [video]

A fresh video from graphics wizard Inigo Quilez about making digital brick walls from code should have been a cozy nerd watch. Instead, the early community mood swerved straight into "cool idea, but does it actually run well?" territory. Quilez invited viewers to toss suggestions into the comments, promising he reads them all, and the audience wasted no time bringing the heat.

The strongest reaction so far came from commenter petermcneeley, who rolled in with a Shadertoy link and a brutally casual verdict: it runs at 10 frames per second on their machine in full screen, and the techniques are "cute but limited." Ouch. That one line basically set the tone for the drama: is this a clever art demo, or a beautiful trick that falls apart the second real-world performance matters?

And that’s where the fun begins. The vibe is classic internet engineering chaos: one side loves the sheer wizardry of building something as ordinary as bricks with math and code, while the other side is already acting like the tower has failed a stress test and should be condemned. There’s also an unintentional comedy to the whole thing—imagine spending nearly 45 minutes explaining digital brickwork only for the first loud reaction to be, essentially, "nice tower, shame it moves like a slideshow." In other words: the bricks are procedural, but the comment-section drama is very, very real.