I’ve never been the type of person who likes coding. That’s a skill that has never attracted my attention. Maybe it’s because I’ve never taken the time to understand any programming language at all, or maybe it’s because my brain is wired in a way that processes information logically through different neural channels not suited for those specialized needs. Call that apathy? I’m more drawn to markup languages though; those define texts and layouts, which are the things I’ve been more familiar with professionally. So in the absence of any training, I’ve never attempted to come up with anything that would successfully execute instructions intended to produce an outcome.
Come 2025 and the boom of AI chatbots. At the very end of that year (December, to be more precise), I decided to experiment with them and see if I could use those tools for something other than retrieving information. That’s when I thought: What if I ask AI to follow my thinking and compile something that could help me understand the Mandelbrot set better? Well, satiating my particular curiosities would be more than enough. And that’s the goal I set.
It’s been almost a month since I started quarreling with these data regurgitators (information providers, other people would say), questioning their nonsensical decisions to disrupt what I set my mind to do, watching desperately as they break the code every iteration, or wrestling them back on course as they catch a phrase that rewinds their pre-programmed behavior, retreating to ideas already surpassed and losing their (and my) north. Chatbots suffer from ADHD —that’s my conclusion— and can’t be medicated.
Yes, I suspect these problems stem from the way I input keywords to construct meaning. After all, they’re just set to interpret what I don’t quite know how to outline myself. We both need training in our own languages. Yet, I’ve managed to come up with a series of tools to help me—and anyone interested—understand the complex dynamics of the Mandelbrot set. While I always insist that this website is dedicated to fractals as subjects of visual representations, none of the apps I’ve collaborated on are intended for artistic creation. I’ve made myself believe that they are didactic and exploratory by design. Or at least that’s what I intended them to be. Play with them and see if you can understand their purpose. And be warned: If you came here looking for some robust generators, go straight to the Fractalware section instead and browse the list of freely available software there. Download as many as you want, and start your journey with them.
Cheers for the New Year!
And no —before you ask— the feature image above wasn’t generated with any of the apps I’m introducing in this post. It’s a fractal I created some time ago using another freeware generator; it’s one of those images —as it happens sometimes— that somehow slipped into limbo: uploaded, then forgotten, and never actually published. Along with a small batch of its cousins, it spent most of 2025 quietly waiting in The Passageway, unseen and unacknowledged. Rather than resurrecting them in a separate post and risk repeating myself, I’m letting this image resurface here as a quiet signpost pointing toward that overlooked gallery. So don’t forget to head to Idea(l)s to take a look at them.