Every building is an automation that runs on its own for me. The town is recounted every Monday from what actually happened, not from what is switched on.
At the top of this site there is a number: how many automations run on their own for me. A number does not tell you what they are. This town shows what type each one is, where it runs and whether it actually did something in the past few weeks. Further down you build a town yourself with the same blocks.
Each district is a place where automations run. In front are the workflows in n8n, the largest district. On the left the scheduled tasks on my laptop, at the back the routines Claude runs at fixed times, on the right my server.
The kind of building tells you who decides. A factory is fixed code. An office follows a fixed route with one AI step in it, such as writing a summary. A house is home to an AI agent: it decides for itself which steps to take.
An automation that is neatly scheduled does not have to do anything. During a clean-up in July I removed two that started on time and no longer added anything. Since then I only count what demonstrably ran: an execution in the n8n log, a last run in the Windows Task Scheduler, a line in the server log.
That makes the night the measurement here. If an automation ran in the past 35 days, its lights are on. If not, the building stays dark and you can see at a glance what went quiet. The town follows the actual daylight hours in the Netherlands: during the day, press Night to see the lights.
The town grows by itself. When an automation is added, a building appears on the first free plot in its district.
Not everything that runs starts by itself. An n8n webhook waits until another system calls it, and the error handling only kicks in when something fails elsewhere. When I work with Claude Code, hooks run alongside: small pieces of code that, for example, stop me from saving work to the project history as long as its test did not pass. They do not count towards the number at the top. In the town they run as pipes underground, visible in the cross-section along the edges: hooks on the left, n8n on the right.
Here too, flow is the proof. A webhook flows when n8n actually ran it in the past 35 days. Hooks are harder, because most of them leave nothing behind. Only a hook that writes something itself can show that it ran. The rest appear as empty pipes. Adding a log just to make those pipes flow is something I deliberately did not do.
A building gets a name when it is already described elsewhere on this site, such as the reports on Ukraine and the AI reading advice. The rest get a broad description. Some of them are tasks for my job, for home and for the kids, and those do not belong on a public site by name.
A new automation appears without a name by default. It only gets one when I add it myself.
The town above runs on a small building game I made first, on its own. Here you can build with it yourself: pick a block and tap a tile. Every pixel comes from code; there is not a single image file in it.
With a mouse you can drag too. On a phone, zoom in with the plus button and swipe to move around. Your town is saved in this browser.
SimCity 2000 and RollerCoaster Tycoon had a recognisable look: seen at an angle from above, small tiles, a limited set of colours. I wanted to know whether you can rebuild that style without drawing a single picture.
Before there was a single building, there was a style sheet with six rules. Every slanted edge steps two pixels sideways and one up. Light always comes from the top left, so the roof is light, the left wall mid-tone and the right wall dark. Every colour belongs to a material: grass, asphalt, brick, glass.
The bright colours of this site only return in the game as light. By day the windows are dark glass. Switch the game to night and every colour shifts towards dark blue while the windows light up, in the colours of the site.
Night is not a second drawing. It is the same drawing with a different palette.
That is how the old games did it too: they swapped colour sets instead of redrawing everything. It keeps the game small. Everything on this page, from the water to the smoke from the chimneys, is one file of code. The town at the top uses that same engine and only adds the count: which building goes where, and whether its lights may be on.
That is the advantage and the problem at once. In the first test every single tile sat half outside the frame, because one offset was wrong. And the trees disappeared into the grass, because they used the same colours. An illustrator sees that straight away; code simply does what it says.
The game only scales in whole steps, because a pixel stretched by half breaks the style. On a phone the board therefore just does not fit: you zoom in with the plus button and swipe it sideways.
The style is imitated, not copied. There is no image, colour set or name from the original games in it.
The town shows what starts on its own. More works behind the scenes: checks that run before something is saved, and workflows that only start when another one calls them. Those will be added later as pipes underground.