About This Visualization

This is an interactive visualization that animates 695 API calls from a single Claude Code session as a physics-based simulation of chickens being summoned from a coop. Like the Assembly Line visualization, it is self-referential — the session it depicts is the session that built this visualization, version by version, across 47 conversational turns.

What You're Seeing

• The Coop (top) — represents the Anthropic API. Every chicken emerges from here.
• The User (bottom-left) — represents the human. Yellow lines connect the user to chickens spawned by their messages.
• Big Chickens — Opus API calls (the main model). These plan the work and delegate tasks.
• Tiny Chickens (chicks) — Haiku API calls spawned by a parent. They do small tasks: reading files, counting tokens, searching code.
• Straw Chickens — appear when the context window fills up. The system compresses all previous conversation history into a summary, and all existing chickens get absorbed into one straw-colored chicken.
• Console (left) — scrolling text showing the user's messages and AI responses.

Click any chicken to see its details. The anatomy bar shows what percentage of the API call was guardrails ("Dogs"), previous AI output ("Chicken"), and user text ("You").

Controls

• Step — advance one chicken at a time
• Next Turn — advance through all chickens in the next conversational turn
• Autoplay — run through all 47 turns automatically
• Restart — reset to the beginning
• Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, click any chicken to inspect, Escape to close

Key Numbers

• 695 total API calls across 47 turns
• 220 MB of data sent to the API
• 37 Opus calls (big chickens) and ~658 Haiku calls (tiny chickens)
• This was version 14 of the visualization — built iteratively over many corrections

The Analogy

This accompanies a presentation called "Everything You Know About AI Is Wrong." AI models are chickens — specifically HeiHei from Moana. They're energetic, they'll peck at anything, but they have no idea what they're doing on their own. The software architecture is the sheepdog that keeps them moving toward the goal. The user is the chicken whisperer — setting direction, correcting course, and trusting the dogs to handle the rest.

A typical API call is roughly ~75% guardrails ("dogs"), ~24% previous AI output ("chickens"), and less than 1% user text ("you"). The straw chicken mechanic shows context compaction — when the chicken's brain gets full, everything gets squished into a summary, and some information is inevitably lost.