So, yeah. Quantum mechanics. It's one of those things that always tickles the back of your brain if you're a dev, right? You think you kinda get it. Double-slit, Schrödinger's cat, all that jazz. But then, every once in a while, something just re-scrambles your eggs in the best possible way.
For me, recently, it was that damn good Veritasium video about really trusting quantum mechanics. I'd *known* about Feynman's path integrals – the idea that a particle takes *every possible path* simultaneously. But seeing it visualized so clearly in that video... it wasn't just an abstract concept anymore. It was like, "Oh. OH. Light is literally exploring *all the goddamn paths*." That hit different.
The idea that broke my brain (in a good way).
And when my brain breaks like that, I gotta build. So, QuantumVibes was born. A quick, dirty, browser-based interactive toy to poke at this weirdness. Popped into existence around early May after some chats and that video rattling around in my skull.
Now, how do you make a quantum sim on a whim when your main jam is C# and Unity, but you want this sucker on the web? You "vibecode" it, my friend. You sit down with an AI – Gemini, in this case – and you start prompting. And prompting. And occasionally cursing.
Let's be real: the effort was probably 1% me and 99% the robot. I did some HTML nudging, but the JavaScript core? That was a collaborative hallucination. Took around 30 solid "shots" (prompt iterations) to get something resembling the vision. And yeah, once Web Workers got involved for performance, I had to nuke the AI's context and start a fresh chat. It gets... *confused*. Standard procedure for anything non-trivial.
Is it elegant code? Probably not. Does it work and let you fiddle with quantum concepts? You bet. That's the chaotic beauty of vibecoding.
The toy has two main modes:
Visualizing the double-slit. That histogram is key!
The classic that gives everyone an existential crisis. My sim lets you:
Slit Separation, Slit Height, Wave Constant (your effective wavelength!), Particle Speed, etc.Accuracy disclaimer: It's a *demonstration*. It shows the *effect*. It's almost certainly not Nobel Prize-winning physics in its mathematical rigor. But the diffraction patterns look cool, and it gets the core idea across.
Feynman's Path Integrals: Drag A and B, see the chaos resolve.
This is where that Veritasium video really shines through in the project. You set start (A) and end (B) points. The sim then draws a zillion random paths between them. The ones closest to the "path of least action" (usually the straightest) are emphasized. It's wild to see the classical path emerge from the quantum fuzz.
That Veritasium video just framed the "all paths" idea in a way that made it *click* visually and intuitively for me. My little sim is a tribute to that. It's one thing to read that a particle explores every route; it's another to *see* a representation of that, even a simplified one, and watch order emerge from apparent chaos.
This was a quick, fun, slightly unhinged project. Mobile experience is probably janky. Accuracy is "good enough for jazz." But if it makes one other person go "whoa, quantum stuff is weirdly cool," then mission accomplished.
Go on, play with QuantumVibes. Break it. Stare into the quantum abyss. You know you want to.
And if you wanna talk shop – gamedev, AI coding adventures, why physics is so wonderfully bizarre, or just share what you're working on – hit up the Discord. It's a good crew, lots of smart folks doing cool shit with multiplayer, VR, AI, hardware, you name it.
Keep it weird, folks.