I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents.
I didn't write a single line of code.
Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped!
I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity:
I know you'll get flak for the agentic coding, but I think it's really awesome you were able to realize an idea that otherwise would've remained relegated to "you know what'd be cool.." territory. Also, just because the activation energy to execute a project like this is lower doesn't mean the creative ceiling isn't just as high as before.
Oh man...
Personally I'm extremely excited about all of the creative domains that this technology unlocks, and also extremely saddened/worried about all of the crafts it makes obsolete (or financially non-viable)...
Firefox, Ubuntu latest.
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://isometric-nyc-tiles.cannoneyed.com/dzi/tiles_metadat.... (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 429.
Edit: i see now, the error is due to the cloudflare worker being rate limited :/ i read the writeup though, pretty cool, especially the insight about tool -> lib -> application
- Chromium: Failed to load tiles: Failed to fetch
- Zen: Failed to load tiles: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Also, does someone have an intuition for how the "masking" process worked here to generate seamless tiles? I sort of grok it but not totally.
Reference image from the article: https://cannoneyed.com/img/projects/isometric-nyc/training_d...
You have to zoom in, but here the inputs on the left are mixed pixel art / photo textures. The outputs on the right are seamless pixel art.
Later on he talks about 2x2 squares of four tiles each as input and having trouble automating input selection to avoid seams. So with his 512x512 tiles, he's actually sending in 1024x1024 inputs. You can avoid seams if every new tile can "see" all its already-generated neighbors.
You get a seam if you generate a new tile next to an old tile but that old tile is not input to the infill agorithm. The new tile can't see that boundary, and the style will probably not match.
I don't think his infill model really cares about tile sizes though, and I doubt it really needs full adjacent tiles to match style. I'm a bit curious why he didn't do something like just generate new tiles one at a time, but expand the input area by 50 pixels on just those sides that have neighbors. Feels like that would sidestep the input selection headache.
More interestingly, not even the biggest smartest image models can tell if a seam exists or not (likely due to the way they represent image tokens internally)
I wonder if for almost any bulk inference / generation task, it will generally be dramatically cheaper to (use fancy expensive model to generate examples, perhaps interactively with refinements) -> (fine tune smaller open-source model) -> (run bulk task).
Interestingly enough, the model could NOT learn how to reliably generate trees or water no matter how much data and/or strategies I threw at it...
This to me is the big failure mode of fine-tuning - it's practically impossible to understand what will work well and what won't and why
Maybe, though a guy did physically carve/sculpt the majority of NYC: https://mymodernmet.com/miniature-model-new-york-minninycity...
That being said I have three kids (one a newborn) - there's no possible way I could have done this in the before times!
Granted, it was a team effort, but that's a lot more laborious than a pixel-art view.
New York City is being recreated at 1:1 scale inside Minecraft
You probably need to adjust how caching is handled with this.
> If you can push a button and get content, then that content is a commodity. Its value is next to zero.
> Counterintuitively, that’s my biggest reason to be optimistic about AI and creativity. When hard parts become easy, the differentiator becomes love.
Love that. I've been struggling to succinctly put that feeling into words, bravo.
