About p5.penplotter
I wanted to try plotting a drawing from a p5 sketch, while keeping the sketch familiar to work with. Recording the shapes as they are drawn seemed a useful place to start.
Me, myself and AI.
Why do I feel like I have to explain how I work with AI?
Don't we all now?
Everybody knows things changed in October 2025. No?
And why do things I create in cooperation with AI feel never finished? Like true vs false, boolean finished.
Not kind of finished.
Why do I feel this terrible unease when an AI (mostly Claude - sorry) permanently puts itself in the contributors list in Github on one of my projects, yet I worked on this with a number of tools and offered hundreds of hours for it myself.
There we are, now. Fifty fifty contributors, next to each other.
Never to go away ever again.
Am I being grumpy? I love AI!
It allows me to do things in weeks that I used to program in hours. No, I mean I gave AI a real shot very early, a coworker eager to shine, but suffering from destructive dementia.
Forgetting plans, "upgrading" long made agreements without remorse.
All that changed in October 2025.
Mostly.
What I try to do is use AI to build bridges that were not there, nor even thinkable before. Bridges with other code things, trying to hold on to what I believe still makes sense. Processing/p5.js coding may well be the best thing that happened to me, so I will not let it be taken away. I optimize processes, let it talk to strange machines, make manuals, learn and keep on coding. I believe it still opens minds of the young and stops calcification for the not so young.
But why am I still explaining myself?
I can still do all this on my own. For now. Slowly.
Last thoughts:
Work with things, be fearless, code, try things, make it break.
Eventually AI might ruin humanity, but didn't we do that on our own already?
Sebastien Vanblaere · prjcts.be
Related work
- p5.plotSvg by Golan Levin records p5 drawings as SVG and covers a wider drawing API.
- p5.plotterControl by Craig Fahner controls GRBL pen plotters live from p5.js.
- p5.gysin and wave samplers: the sister libraries; the second supplies the numbers several examples here draw with.
MIT License. Source and issues on GitHub.