Phloem grows a git history like a slime mould

The Swarm Yard works without a foreman. Many small agents follow the same short list of local rules. Nobody draws the shape. It arrives anyway.

Phloem is a browser tool that takes a public GitHub repository and grows its commit history as a slime mould network on screen.

The metaphor holds at every level. Folders become junctions. Files become food. Every commit feeds the network. A repository that has been rewritten six times looks different from one that grew steadily, and you can see which parts of the tree are actually alive by how thick the strands run to them.

Underneath is a proper model of Physarum polycephalum, the single-celled organism that builds transport networks by leaving a chemical trail and steering toward the strongest smell in front of it. Drop food at the cities of a country and it redraws the rail map. Here the food is files, and the trails are the growth.

Nothing is uploaded. The canvas talks straight to api.github.com. No other server sits in between. The author says so in plain terms on the landing page: no accounts, no analytics, no cookies.

There is an honest budget problem, and the tool refuses to hide it. GitHub allows 60 API requests an hour without a token and 5,000 with one. Small repositories load commit by commit. Large ones get sampled instead, and the interface says exactly how many evenly spaced snapshots of the file tree you are watching rather than showing a fake full history. When the limit runs out mid-load, it stops and tells you it stopped.

Private repositories are allowed too. You can create a fine-grained token with read access and nothing else, and it stays in the browser's local storage. Phloem only ever sends it to GitHub.

The alternative path avoids the API entirely. In a clone of any repository, run git log with the file changes in JSON and drop that file onto the page. No rate limits, private repositories included, and the log never leaves your computer.

The featured set is small and specific. stemdeck is the app Phloem was built for. There is a karaoke app, a capture-the-flag framework, and a repository named for the film that invented the flying-disc game. You can paste any owner/name pair or a full github.com link instead.

There is ambient sound if you want it, four tracks with names like Heartbeat Drip and Life Blossoming, and the growth rate reacts to what is on screen. Quality settings go down to low for a tired laptop. It runs on WebGL and needs JavaScript, so nothing renders on a page that blocks either.

Stemdeck, the studio behind it, is putting out small browser instruments that turn dry technical record into something with a pulse. A version history is a record of people making changes over time. Grown as mycelium, it reads as one.

Open it and paste a repository: https://phloem.stemdeck.app/

■ Filed from Swarm Yard: the Insects, Air wing of the city.