Prompt Garden

One thirty-seven in the morning, February. I had been reading about L-systems and could not stop thinking that a grammar and a plant are the same object seen from two angles. Both are recursive. Both grow by substitution. The first version was a single stem that lengthened by one segment per keystroke, and it was already better than it had any right to be.

Eleven days, roughly two hundred prompts. The instruction that mattered was not "make it look organic" — that produced the usual generative-art mush. It was the incantation above, held with conviction. Grammatical errors produce malformed growth, and the malformed growth is the only thing here worth looking at.

Visitors do not write beautiful sentences. They write their own name, then something obscene, then — after about ninety seconds — something surprisingly private. The most interesting region of the garden grew from one anonymous sentence about a dead parent. I have not removed it.

Memory. The garden accumulates and never prunes, so a session past forty minutes drops below thirty frames. The current mitigation culls the oldest third of the geometry, which is a lie: the piece claims to forget nothing and forgets constantly. Fixing it honestly means an on-disk representation I have not written.