Sand Art and Sunshine
A Developer Dad's journey from 0 to 100 and back to 0 again
Welcome to my Sand Art journey. This story has the elements of any good tale: desire, triumph, heartbreak, and, of course, a duck.
And the only thing AI wrote was the code.
March 2024
I’ve just set up my Oasis Mini, and I love watching it generate patterns in the sand. But I’ll be honest: my kids love it more. They can pick an image on the app and watch it become a physical presence in our house, and it’s always a surprise to see what the table will generate next.
It was only a matter of time before my daughter asked if we could put her favorite characters on it.
Of course there is no Tinkerbell or Ghost Spider in the catalog, so I immediately had an idea to make a tool that could convert images into patterns. This was two years ago.
February 16, 2026
I started using Opus 4.6 to see what all the fuss was about, and I gave it the requirements for my old sand art generation idea as a test.
And, surprising no one, it completed the task better than I could.
I took a week and stood up SandPath (GitHub here).
February 20, 2026
Now here’s the other half of the story. My family and I had planned a trip to Puerto Rico. As impressive as Opus is, SandPath was still a little buggy and needed refinement (extra lines were appearing on the output). Still, I wrote a few posts and planned to fix and promote it once we got back.
We flew out and had a great time. Puerto Rico was sunny and beautiful and beach-y. It was the exact opposite of our Midwestern igloo. We saw the rainforest. My son, Connor, chased the tropical birds and zoomed around the place finding lizards, screaming “Lizard again! Lizard again!”
Then, on a whim, I checked the Reddit sub where I was planning to post.
Someone had created the exact same tool, but better. There’s no backend to this thing. It runs entirely in the browser. It’s crazy accurate. Plus, the guy who developed it seems like a genuinely cool dude.
I sighed and put my phone away.
A few hours later I did some reflecting. Why was I upset? Because the glory belonged to someone else? I didn’t even write SandPath’s algorithm, but I’d gotten emotionally attached to it.
Sure I’d wasted some effort and some tokens, but my goal was to put my daughter’s favorite characters on the table. Now I could do that.
March 1, 2025
We got back from Puerto Rico and I used Mujou to convert an image of Ghost Spider into a sand art pattern.
I said: “Look! Ghost Spider is on the sand table!”
My four-year-old daughter peeked over the edge and saw her favorite super hero generated after weeks of effort and emotional turbulence. She said:
“Cool. Can you put on a duck for Connor?”
Then she went back to playing.
I started googling duck images.
It was all worth it.
And if you’re interested you can generate your own sand art images at SandPath or the (honestly much better) Mujou . I use an Oasis Mini, but there are a ton of options. Maybe your kids will find it even more entertaining than mine did!
Well this is cool!