name: anidoodle description: Code-drawn illustrations, animations and scored films in nine hand-drawn styles, zero assets, identical every render. Use for hero art, explainers, stickers, loops, animated logos, storyboards or a short film. metadata: created_by: Alex Greenshpun (10x Company) license: Apache-2.0

anidoodle

Pictures, loops and films drawn entirely in code. One pure function, renderFrame(film, ctx, frame, env), paints every frame; a second pure function writes every audio sample. A still is that function called once. Nothing downloaded, nothing sampled, nothing random, so the source rebuilds the same pixels on any machine, at any size, for as long as the file exists.

The engine is the easy half. Pieces get thrown away because they had no point, because the subject looked like a road-sign icon of itself, because the style was a palette swap, because the music sounded like a ghost crying, or because the client's patience went on approving fragments. This skill carries the craft that prevents each of those.

What are you making?

Ask for the size, the style (or pick one from references/styles.md and say why) and where it will live, if the request leaves them open. Everything else has a default.

The seven laws

1. Every piece has a point. A still: one idea, one focal subject, one light. A film: one transformation, one payoff, one visual token that returns. → references/storytelling.md
2. State the realism. "A butterfly" gets you the road-sign icon of a butterfly. Name the anatomy, the view, and the reference you opened. → references/realism-and-craft.md
3. A style is a way of making marks. Change the medium, the edge and the order of the marks, beyond the palette. → references/styles.md
4. Prove the look on ONE still, then build end to end. One still buys the look. After that, gates cost more than they save. → references/working-method.md
5. The contract is absolute. Pure in (frame, env), rng(seed) only, no clock, no ctx.filter, no assets. Texture is geometry and seeded tiles. → references/determinism-and-contract.md
6. Music gets a recipe, never an adjective. Major key, plucked, I-IV-V-I, no pads, no drones, no long reverb. You cannot hear your output, so you do not improvise. → references/music-recipe.md
7. One directs, one builds, both write everything down. When a session degrades, reset it; the files are the memory. → references/working-method.md

Workflows

Still. (1) Say the idea in one sentence and name the focal subject and the light. (2) Open real reference for anything that exists, and note which. (3) Pick the style and read its plate's module first. (4) Draw: cast shadow, form, line, paper, in that medium's order. (5) Render with still.mjs at full size, critique it in writing against the craft bar. ✋ One approval. (6) Deliver at every size asked for from the same source, and say reproducible was printed.

Loop. As a still, plus: every motion is periodic over the loop (whole cycles only), the subject never stops, something moves in every second. Check the seam (last frame against frame 0). Export GIF, WebM or APNG per references/formats.md. ✋ One approval, on the moving file.

Film.

1. Write the story in three sentences (setup, transformation, payoff) and name the token. If you cannot, stop. Do not open an editor.
2. Put it on the grid. 120 bpm at 30 fps is a 15-frame beat. Cuts on multiples of 15, events on multiples of 5. ONE cue table per film holds every frame number, and a checker runs at load.
3. Open real reference for anything that exists in the world, and write down which images.
4. ONE look still: the hardest frame, hero subject large, in its world, in the final medium and light. Critique it yourself in writing first. ✋ Approval gate.
5. ONE 8-second music sample from the recipe. ✋ Approval gate. The client listens; you can't.
6. Build the whole film. No per-shot approvals. Mechanical checks run continuously and need nobody: types, grid, contract scan, draw budget, determinism, dead air.
7. Review the whole film once, from the rendered file: contact sheet at one tile per beat, each cut as a before/after pair, the dead-air numbers. One ranked fix list. One rebuild.
8. Verify and deliver. ✋ Final approval. Say what you verified and what you cannot: you cannot hear it and you cannot watch it move.

Three approval gates at most. Approval is a budget; spend it where being wrong is expensive.

The craft bar

The test: would a proud human illustrator ship this, or is it mechanical shape-assembly?

No dead air in anything that moves: something visibly changes in every second, from frame 0. Check it with the tool AND by eye: a creeping camera changes every pixel and satisfies the tool while the eye sees a still.

The engine

engine/ is the portable art core plus the tooling. Nothing in engine/src/canvas-core knows about React, Remotion, the DOM, or any backend; that separation is verified, not asserted.

node <skill>/engine/tools/scaffold.mjs ~/art --still hero --film intro   # either or both
cd ~/art && npm install && npx playwright-core install chromium
node tools/still.mjs hero --out out/hero.png --scale 2   # a picture, with its reproducibility hash
node tools/render.mjs intro                               # the MP4; --out x.gif | x.webm | x.apng for loops
node tools/gate.mjs intro --mp4 out/intro.mp4            # determinism + contract + dead air
node tools/emit.mjs intro --out out/intro.html           # one self-contained offline player

Four backends, one art core: playwright, html-player, remotion, hyperframes. Each is roughly 100 lines and none is visible from the core. → references/backends-and-adapters.md

Worked examples

• The nine style plates in engine/src/canvas-core/ (ranunculus, koi, pocketWatch, balloon, wren, moonPhases, fox, lighthouse, mellan): one still each, the recipe in the header. banner.ts is an ambient loop; mellanUnspool.ts a still that draws itself.
• MECHANICAL LEPIDOPTERA in example/: 1410 frames, 47 s, a clockwork butterfly that is drawn, comes alive, and leaves its blueprint in the grass. Spec: example/butterfly-film-spec.md. butterfly/alive/anatomy.ts is realism as code; butterfly/surface.ts is a cache key that names everything its pixels depend on. node <skill>/engine/tools/scaffold.mjs ~/study --example

Study them. Do not copy them. Copying gets you somebody else's picture with your title on it, and the craft bar is not satisfied by inheritance.

Honest limits

You cannot hear the score and you cannot watch the film move. Every claim about either must come from a measurement or from a human. Say which. A green checkmark is a claim, not evidence, until you re-run it: on the worked film the dead-air gate passed while a second of near-stillness sat in the cut, and a cache key that was wrong in one frame order survived every eye that read the code. The machine found that one; no human was ever going to.

Nine styles to choose from

Each style is its own way of making a mark: the taper of a nib, the bleed of a wash, the scumble of chalk on slate, the torn edge of cut paper, the halftone of a risograph drum, one engraved line spiralling out to become a moon. The subject changes shape in each hand, the way it would for nine different illustrators. Pick one for your brand and every picture after it arrives in the same hand. Every plate above, and the contact sheet itself, is drawn by code in this repo.

What you can make

Ask in plain words, "a risograph lighthouse for our careers page, 1600×900" or "a chalkboard explainer of how our pricing tiers stack up", and anidoodle routes it to the right workflow and style recipe, asking only for what the request leaves open.

What it packs

The engine is the easy half. The craft is the part anidoodle carries for you, six lessons, each one earned by getting a piece wrong first and written down so you start where the last project ended:

• Story gives every piece a point. One idea and one focal subject for a still; one transformation, one payoff and one returning token for a film. → storytelling.md
• Realism comes from naming it. The anatomy, the view and the reference you opened, so a butterfly reads as a creature with a body and veins. → realism-and-craft.md
• Style lives in the mark. Nine full recipes, a guide for picking one per job, and the steps for inventing your own. → styles.md
• Music follows a recipe. Major key, plucked, a phrase that asks a question and resolves home, warm and sure. → music-recipe.md
• Determinism is the guarantee. Pure functions and a seeded random, so anyone with the source rebuilds the exact same piece. → determinism-and-contract.md
• Method keeps you fast. Prove the look on one still, build straight through, and spend approval where being wrong is expensive. → working-method.md

Every format ships from the same source: PNG, MP4 with its score, GIF, WebM and animated PNG with transparency, and one self-contained HTML file. → formats.md

It draws, then it moves

▶ The full 47-second film, sound on. 1080×1080 with an original score, every frame and sample generated in code:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/019d46d3-536a-4843-9f68-8e8f5f5c3401

One pure function paints each frame, so a finished illustration is that function called once, a sticker is the same function on a loop, and a film is it with a story and a score. The same guarantees hold for all three.

Pay once, draw forever

A picture model spends tokens and compute on every frame of every render, and it draws something new each time. Code spends them once. The 47-second film is a single program: written one time, it renders all 1,410 frames and a full stereo score, at any size, on any machine, free every time it runs. That works out to about sixty tokens of code per frame on the first pass, and zero on every pass after. A still is a few hundred lines. A whole family of images is a list of seeds.

Get started

anidoodle is an agent skill: one folder with a SKILL.md at the top. For Claude Code, clone it into your skills folder:

git clone https://github.com/alexgreensh/anidoodle ~/.claude/skills/anidoodle

Then ask for what you want: "draw a pencil & watercolour pear for our recipes page". To drive the engine yourself:

node ~/.claude/skills/anidoodle/engine/tools/scaffold.mjs ~/art --still hero --film intro
cd ~/art && npm install && npx playwright-core install chromium

node tools/still.mjs  hero  --out out/hero.png --scale 2   # a finished illustration, print size
node tools/render.mjs intro --out out/intro.gif            # a loop; also .mp4 with score, .webm with alpha
node tools/emit.mjs   intro --out out/intro.html           # the whole piece as one offline file
node tools/gate.mjs   hero                                 # determinism, contract and dead air in one pass

Node 20 or newer. Stills need only the browser above; anything that moves also uses ffmpeg.

emit writes one HTML file, around 100 KB, that plays the piece with sound on a double-click, offline. It carries the recipe and draws everything again from scratch every time you open it. Attach it to an email and you have shipped a studio.

Four backends share one art core, and the core stays blissfully unaware of which one is drawing: playwright, html-player, remotion, hyperframes.

The example film

example/ holds Mechanical Lepidoptera: 1,410 frames, 47 seconds, a clockwork butterfly that drafts itself, comes alive in watercolour, and leaves its blueprint in the grass. It is the whole engine in one piece: control points placed by hand over real anatomy, a cache key that names every input a pixel depends on, a score built from the recipe, and one unbroken move from built to alive. The nine style plates sit beside the engine in engine/src/canvas-core/, each with its recipe written at the top. Open any of them, change a number, and watch what moves.

Honest by design

Sound and motion earn their claims. Every statement about the score or the movement carries a measurement or a human's eye behind it, and a green checkmark counts once it has been re-run. That discipline is why the same piece comes back byte for byte, every time, on every machine.

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Copyright 2026 Alex Greenshpun.

Built with anidoodle, which learned everything it knows by drawing the butterfly a few honest times.