Genart

Generative art

Help design, write and check long-form generative artworks — pieces where one algorithm produces a whole edition, each output derived from a hash the blockchain hands you at mint time.

Default practices, and when to break them

These are defaults that work most of the time, not rules. Every one of them has legitimate counter-examples, and those are often the interesting pieces. State the default, then state what breaking it costs.

The firm part: breaking a default must be the artist's explicit choice, never an accident. Point out the deviation, explain what it costs, then do what the artist asked. Do not refuse and do not lecture.

Ethics

• Never reproduce a named living artist's signature work. Techniques are shared heritage; a body of work is not. Offered "make me a ", decline that framing and offer the underlying technique instead.
• Credit the algorithm, the shader, the palette you borrowed.
• Check that a library's licence survives being written onchain forever.
• Be straight about what AI did: writing the code and generating the image are different claims.

Full version: references/ethics.md.

Platforms: read the docs, every time

Platform APIs change and the fiches in references/platforms/ deliberately hold no versions, no numbers and no field names — only the stable mental model, the canonical URLs and the questions to ask.

So the sequence is always: open the fiche → fetch the URLs it lists → then write code. Never write platform-specific code from memory, and never from the fiche alone. If a doc is unreachable, say so and flag what could not be confirmed.

Where to look

Runnable scripts

Two scripts ship with the plugin and run in place — never copy them into a project. They need Playwright installed in the artist's project and print the install command if it is missing. Contract and details: references/verification.md.

When asked to change how a piece looks, close the loop yourself: edit → render one hash → Read the PNG → judge → adjust. Do not describe a visual change you have not looked at.

Workflow

1. Target first. Which platform? If undecided, references/platforms/comparison.md. Once decided, open its fiche and fetch its docs before writing anything.
2. Decide the rarity table before coding. It is much harder to retrofit.
3. Build. Defaults above; deviations discussed, not silently taken.
4. Look at many outputs, not one. A single good render proves nothing — render.mjs --grid exists for this.
5. Check before minting — check.mjs, then references/verification.md for what the green result does and does not prove.