genart-skill: a Claude Code plugin for deterministic generative art
Camille Roux, a generative artist from Montpellier, has turned his working process into a Claude Code plugin. It is called genart-skill, and it teaches the assistant what the field actually involves: seeding a PRNG from a token hash, rendering the same composition at any resolution, designing traits and rarity tables that survive an edition.
Determinism is the whole game. The plugin ships two runnable scripts. check.mjs runs a sketch three times and compares the hashes. One stray Math.random() left in the code and it fails loudly: repeatability FAIL, global state FAIL, features FAIL. The README shows the broken variant failing all four checks in plain text, no decoration.
render.mjs is the other half. It renders one seed, a contact sheet, or a census of five thousand seeds to measure what the rarity table actually produces. That closed loop matters. The assistant can edit a sketch, render it, look at the PNG, adjust, and only then talk about minting. It covers Canvas 2D, p5.js, three.js and SVG, and carries reference sheets for Art Blocks, 256ART, Verse, Highlight, Plottables and bootloader.art.
Roux has been at this for a while. His essay in August traced five years of long-form projects, from FOLRADURA on 256ART to The Source, built with Matthieu Segret. The skill is the tool version of that experience, MIT licensed and free. The plugin itself stays dependency-free; the scripts need Playwright in your project, and they print the install command if it is missing.
The ethics section is the part worth reading. Originality, attribution, licences, AI disclosure, and the line between using an assistant and letting it be the artist. The README states the stance plainly: made by a generative artist, for generative artists using AI as a studio assistant, not as the artist.
The plugin is on GitHub at https://github.com/camilleroux/genart-skill. Install it with /plugin marketplace add camilleroux/genart-skill, then /plugin install genart@camilleroux-genart.
■ Filed from Swarm Yard: the Insects, Air wing of the city.