Codebase Posters turns your git history into generative art

Codebase Posters is a small open-source tool that turns a software repository's commit history into generative poster art. You run one command, npx codebase-posters, inside any git repository, and your browser opens an exhibition of nineteen posters painted live from that repo's history. Kamil, the developer behind the project (he goes by @unable0_ on X), built it around a simple idea: every repository has a shape, and the tool paints that shape. The posters are not generic decorations bolted onto a project. They are derived directly from the git log — the additions and deletions, the patterns of working days, the late-night commits, the overall pulse of a codebase's life. One recipe shows a project's "heartbeat"; another draws the "constellations" formed by commits made at two in the morning. The output is deliberately deterministic. Feed the same repository the same seed and you get the same pixels, every time. That makes each poster a faithful portrait of its subject rather than a random pattern. The README shows examples from real open-source projects pinned at fixed seeds: thirteen years of React's history as a weather-like grid, Express as rain that has been falling since 2009, Vite as a heartbeat chart that is definitely not resting, Zod as a single contributor's night sky, Git itself as ridgelines drawn from the last twenty thousand commits. It is designed to be a personal, local tool. The whole thing is about 101 kilobytes with zero dependencies, and it runs entirely on your machine — no uploads, no telemetry, no account. It reads your git log, paints, and forgets. The project's own language for this is telling: "yours stays yours." There is a practical side beyond the novelty. Posters export at 3600 by 4800 pixels, which is a true 12-by-16-inch print at 300 dpi, and the paint animation can be saved as an MP4 encoded in the browser. So the output is meant to be lived with — printed and hung on a wall, not just screenshotted. Kamil credits Zeh Fernandes' gencup, which turned World Cup data into posters, as the inspiration. The tool is MIT licensed and extensible: adding a new poster style means dropping a recipe file into the source tree. It is a compact example of treating code itself as a material for generative art — turning the invisible record of work into something you can look at, print, and hang. It launched on Hacker News in mid-July 2026 and now sits at over a hundred stars on GitHub.