98 days, 374 commits, 16 releases. Scrutinizer was a sprint through the frontier of biologically-inspired rendering — where theoretical correctness meets visual stability at 60fps.
This page documents the development arc. For the vision science and shader implementation, see Inside the Math.
November 2025 – February 2026
Scrutinizer was built in a 98-day sprint — November 2025 through February 2026. Here's how it compares to its sibling project, Psychodeli+ (a year-long evolution of a 1997 screensaver into an AI-directed audio-reactive visualizer).
| Metric | Scrutinizer | Psychodeli+ |
|---|---|---|
| Commits | 374 | 1,703 |
| Calendar span | 98 days | 340 days |
| Active days | 37 (38%) | 175 (52%) |
| Lines written / deleted | +46,908 / -13,504 | +492,839 / -271,393 |
| Net codebase | 11,057 lines / 42 files | ~130k lines / 275 files |
| Shader lines | 2,052 (3 files) | ~4,500 (2 files) |
| Documentation | 46 markdown files | 128 markdown files |
| Golden captures | 95 PNGs / 8 versions | 78 images (essay) |
| Releases | 16 tags (v1.0–v1.6.0) | Continuous deploy |
| Reverts | 7 (3 in one day) | ~15 |
| Peak commits/day | 63 (Nov 23) | 45 |
| Longest streak | 14 days | 29 days |
| AI co-authored* | 3 (1%) | 88 (41% in Feb) |
Scrutinizer is a sprint where Psychodeli+ is a marathon. One release every 6 days. 63 commits on launch day. And the shader — touched in 9% of all commits — is where every perceptual experiment lives or dies.
*AI co-author counts reflect git workflow, not AI contribution. In Scrutinizer, the developer
handled all git commits directly. In Psychodeli+, the AI agent started doing commits — the
co-author tag tracks who runs git commit, not who wrote the code.
2025-11 | +24,680 -7,555 (net +17k) ← THE BIG BANG
2025-12 | +17,690 -4,916 (net +13k) ← Perceptual accuracy push
2026-01 | +2,218 -374 (net +2k) ← Mobile + calibration
2026-02 | +2,320 -659 (net +2k) ← De-monolith refactorThe most telling story in the git history isn't the commits — it's the reverts. On December 13, 2025, three rollbacks happened within 30 minutes. Each one pulled the shader back to a less ambitious but more stable tier of perceptual fidelity.
This is the frontier of biologically-inspired rendering: the gap between "theoretically correct" and "visually stable at 60fps" is where the real engineering lives.
The three reverts on December 13th were the project's inflection point. We learned that biological accuracy isn't the goal — perceptual plausibility is. The human visual system is noisy, approximate, and good enough. The shader should be too.