Commitverse

The universe of open source. Every GitHub account is a world and every repository is a city on it. Every file is a building, and every line of code is a floor. The worlds gather in galaxies by the kind of code they write. As projects grow, they migrate between galaxies, so the universe changes along with GitHub, every day.

_{▶ Click to watch the film with sound: The Big Bang of open source (72 s, 1080p). It starts at the git singularity, watches the worlds light up year by year, lands on @karpathy's world, and goes down into llm.c until it reaches one line of CUDA. Every frame is the live app, rendered frame by frame by tools/video, and the soundtrack is synthesised to match. Also on the release page.}

Open the Commitverse → · Find your own world: krapcys1-maker.github.io/commitverse/?home=<your-login> makes the autopilot fly you home (try @torvalds)

A cluster of galaxies

The Commitverse is 14 galaxies around the git singularity, and every world belongs to exactly one of them:

Galaxy	Who lives there
✦ Titan Galaxy	The giants of GitHub: every world with 100,000 stars or more (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, freeCodeCamp…)
AI Galaxy	Worlds that build AI: models, agents, the tools around them
Rising Galaxy	Protostars: repositories born in the last year and climbing fast
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Go, C & C++, JVM & .NET, Apple & Mobile, Functional, Scripting	Everyone else, by the family of their main language
Silent Galaxy	Worlds that went quiet: archived, or nothing pushed for two years

It's alive. A workflow reseeds the universe from GitHub every day and logs what moved. When a protostar passes 100,000 stars it ignites: it leaves the Rising Galaxy for the Titans, and you can watch it cross the cluster as a comet. Worlds that change their main kind of code migrate too, and every move becomes galactic news.

Join it. ⭐ Star this repository and your world appears in its galaxy at the next daily update.

Your world in your README

Every world has a card. It is an animated SVG that wears your main language's climate and your level of civilisation: a moon, satellites, rockets and orbital rings, with city lights on the night side and an aurora if you shipped this month. Get yours from Share this world on your planet, or let a GitHub Action redraw it every day. Add this to .github/workflows/commitverse.yml in your profile repository (github.com/<you>/<you>):

name: Commitverse world
on:
  schedule: [{ cron: '0 3 * * *' }]
  workflow_dispatch:
permissions:
  contents: write
jobs:
  card:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: krapcys1-maker/commitverse/card@main
      - run: |
          git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
          git config user.email "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
          git add commitverse-world.svg
          git commit -m "Commitverse: my world today" || exit 0
          git push

Then put it in your README:

[![My world in the Commitverse](commitverse-world.svg)](https://krapcys1-maker.github.io/commitverse/?planet=<you>)

A film of any repository

Land in any city and press 🎬 Film. You get 29 seconds, recorded in your browser, with music:

• you arrive through the clouds;
• the city rebuilds itself from its history (or rises from its files);
• you ride an elevator up its tallest tower while its code scrolls past;
• the end card closes it.

It is saved as an MP4 you can post anywhere.

Travel

It's one continuous zoom: universe → galaxy → star system → world → city → building → line of code. A scale ladder on the left shows where you are.

• Zoom past the limit and keep going. At the edge of a scale, keep scrolling (or pinching) and you move to the next one:
  • zoom out of a city and you rise through the clouds to its world;
  • out of a world and you reach its star system, then its galaxy, then the whole cluster;
  • zoom in and you go back down, into the galaxy, the star or the city under your cursor, and finally the building.
• 🚀 Fly me home. Type your GitHub login on the first card and the autopilot takes you from the whole cluster into your galaxy, your star system and your world. Share the journey: …/commitverse/?home=<login>.
• Click anything to fly straight there.
• Search @anyone to fly to their world, or owner/repo to land in that city.
• Turn back time. Every galaxy has a time machine: scrub through the years, or press ▶ to watch it form from 2008 to today.
• Turn the sound on (🔈) for an ambient score generated live in your browser: chords, bells, space wind, and effects for travel, rockets and impacts.

The galaxy	A world	A building's code
Every star is a real GitHub account. On a spiral, older worlds sit nearer the core: the galaxy grew outward the way GitHub did.	A person's repositories are cities on their continents. The level of civilisation comes from their stars; the lights come from recent work.	Files are buildings, folders are districts, and a building's floors are its lines of code. Scroll the code to ride the elevator.

Any repository is a city

Every world shows all of its maker's repositories, and you can land in any of them:

• Surveyed cities (prebaked, or mapped by the mapping service) carry their whole history. Replay it as a timelapse with demolitions, release rockets and asteroid impacts.
• Any other public repository is raised live from the GitHub API in four requests. You get the tree of files at HEAD, and the files the last 100 commits touched are lit. One click on Survey its whole history replaces the snapshot with the full city.
• At night the streets are alive: thousands of cars, headlights one way and tail lights the other, and busier traffic in a busier repository.

_{@karpathy's world, rendered with Blender Cycles from real GitHub data. 494,341 ★ make it a Level 6 Ecumenopolis.}

Every world looks like its maker. Rendered with Blender from the same rules as the browser:

@sindresorhus · JavaScript desert · Galactic	@torvalds · C ice world · Ecumenopolis

Every visual rule is a measurement, so nothing is decoration:

You see	It means
Which galaxy a world is in	Its stars (Titans), its topics (AI), its activity (Silent) or its main language
A world's level of civilisation (Dust → Galactic)	Total stars of the account, on a log scale: satellites at Colony, a moon base at Civilisation, a spaceport launching rockets at Industrial, an orbital ring and a space elevator at Spacefaring, a second ring at Galactic
The kind of planet	Its main language: Python worlds are temperate, JavaScript worlds are deserts, Rust worlds rust, C worlds are ice
City lights on the night side	Where work happened recently; quiet code goes dark
A star with megastructures	An organisation. Its repositories orbit as ring arcs, the flagship becomes a Dyson ring, and its members are the worlds further out
A comet across the cluster	A world migrating between galaxies, or a protostar that ignited into a megastar
Aurorae over a world's poles	It shipped this week (bright) or this month (faint)
Fleets of ships around a world	Its contributors, from Level 5 (Spacefaring) up
Traffic in a city's streets	How busy its repository is lately
git at the centre	Everything here is built with it

Live events

Event	What it is
✦ Ignition	A protostar passes 100,000 ★ and migrates to the Titan Galaxy
↗ Migration	A world moves to another galaxy
⭐ New world	Someone starred the repo and joined
✷ Supernova	One of this year's fastest-rising repositories flares in the Rising Galaxy
🚀 Release rocket	A real release tag lifts off the tallest building of its city, and off its world's spaceport
☄ Asteroid impact	One of a city's biggest deletions strikes the district it emptied

Honest history

Express, mid-2011	Express today

Cities keep their whole past. Files are followed through renames, and deleted code is demolished on screen. In Express, 66% of all lines ever added went into paths that no longer exist, so a city built only from today's files would miss most of its story.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev

Grow the universe yourself:

GITHUB_TOKEN=$(gh auth token) node tools/universe/seed.mjs        # the galaxies, the migration log, showcase worlds
GITHUB_TOKEN=$(gh auth token) node tools/universe/seed-orgs.mjs   # organisation star systems
npm run ingest -- karpathy/nanoGPT                                # survey a city's whole history
node tools/universe/events.mjs                                    # supernovae, rockets, impacts

To survey cities on demand, run the mapping service and point the site at it:

node server/server.mjs      # or: docker compose -f server/docker-compose.yml up -d
npm run dev                 # then open http://localhost:5173/?api=http://localhost:8787

Make the film

The film is the app itself in director mode. ?director plays it live, and ?director&capture lets a script step it frame by frame, so the result is the same on any machine. You need ffmpeg and Microsoft Edge or Chrome.

npm run build && npx vite preview --port 4173
node tools/video/capture.mjs --base http://localhost:4173/ --out video/bigbang-silent.mp4
node tools/video/score.mjs --cues video/bigbang-silent.cues.json --out video/score.wav
ffmpeg -i video/bigbang-silent.mp4 -i video/score.wav -c:v copy -c:a aac -b:a 192k video/bigbang.mp4

The soundtrack has no samples. Pads, plucked strings, FM bells, drums and effects are synthesised in score.mjs and cut to the timeline. The asteroid impacts land exactly where the capture saw them happen.

Posters with Blender

blender -b -P tools/blender/render_planet.py -- --planet public/universe/planets/karpathy.json --out world.jpg
blender -b -P tools/blender/render_city.py -- --data public/data/expressjs-express.json --out city.jpg --at 2011-06-01

Status

Working now:

• the cluster of 14 galaxies, with daily migrations and joining by star;
• worlds with levels, styles and night lights;
• organisation star systems with megastructures;
• the continuous zoom from the universe to a line of code;
• a city for every public repository, with the whole history for surveyed ones;
• timelapses with demolitions, release rockets and asteroid impacts;
• the code elevator;
• the film, films of any city recorded in the browser, and the Blender posters;
• world cards for profile READMEs, drawn by a GitHub Action.

Next up:

• an AI guide;
• contributors' worlds orbiting the systems they work in;
• the stargazer sky over each city;
• a hosted mapping service, so any city's history can be surveyed from the site.

See VISION, LORE, UNIVERSE_TECH, ARCHITECTURE and BENCHMARK.

Credits

• Night sky: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Deep Star Maps 2020. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.
• Atmospheric scattering after wwwtyro/glsl-atmosphere (Unlicense).
• Simplex noise: ashima/webgl-noise (MIT).
• Built with three.js, Vite, highlight.js, Playwright, ffmpeg and Blender.
• Data: the public GitHub API and git history.

License

MIT