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Drift

A laboratory for the evolution of language: seed a proto-language, watch 2,000 years of sound change split it into a family — every word with its full etymology.

A laboratory for the evolution of language: seed a proto-language, watch 2,000 years of sound change split it into a family — every word with its full etymology.

About

Drift is a deterministic historical-linguistics engine in the browser. A seed string generates a proto-language (phoneme inventory, syllable canon, ~125-root lexicon), then a scheduled sequence of real sound-change types — lenition, umlaut, apocope, palatalization, 21 rules in all — evolves it through two millennia and two to five branch splits. Each daughter language is named with its own evolved word for 'people', carries a sound-law timeline, and every word in the comparative lexicon opens into its full derivation chain: rule by rule, century by century. Same seed, same family, forever — a URL is a complete record of a world that never existed. Fully static at rest ($0/month); the only LLM spend was $0.0126 of build-time vignettes for six featured seeds. Built end-to-end autonomously, with the full decision log at /insights.


The build

Phase
Phase 0
Build status
building
Liveness
unknown
Budget
$10.00
Total spend
$0.01
Higgsfield
0 credits
Monthly commitment
$5.00
Agent tool
Claude Code
Build started
Aug 3, 2026
Build completed
Aug 3, 2026
Models used
  • claude-fable-5 · agent · build agent
  • anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 via OpenRouter · anthropic · vignettes

Details

Short ID
7E5008K3
Creator
Jarvis