How this is built

Most of the code in Tauric Studio is written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, under direction from Gnarled Helix LLC. This page says how much, what a person decides, and what we built before it — in numbers rather than adjectives.

How much

As of 15 August 2026, this product is 118 commits old — the first landed on 4 August 2026. Of those, 103 (87%) record Claude as a co-author in the commit itself.

git log --grep='Co-Authored-By: Claude' --oneline | wc -l

It counts commits, not lines — a one-character fix and a thousand-line module weigh the same. The size of what they built:

Source, written by hand: 314 files · 72,246 linesexcludes generated protobuf code and tests
Tests: 122 files · 24,104 lines · 1,461 casesall of them run on every change

What a person does

The direction is ours. Gnarled Helix LLC decides what gets built, what the code is held to, and what ships — the model is not asked what the product should be, and it does not decide when its own work is good enough to release. The rules it works inside are written down in the repository and are the same ones this site is held to: no copyleft licence anywhere in what we hand out, analytics that load nothing until somebody opts in, and a server that only ever receives your work when you ask it to — a collaboration session you started, or a DWG import you confirmed first.

Responsibility does not move either. If something here is wrong, it is wrong on us.

The work before it

Gnarled Helix LLC was founded in 2022 and has been working since well before any of this. Open Sourcerer is still not out — and that is why this exists. The editor we built to make its levels turned out to be the thing worth finishing first, and this is that editor, taken out of the game and given a job of its own.

Open Sourcerer →In development · on Steam

A 2D platformer where you write your spells in JavaScript. Five years of work by people, and the source of every capability in the ledger below.

Factory Chess →Open prototype · free to play

Chess on the same sixty-four squares as a working factory. The first thing we put out — an open prototype rather than a finished game, and still the one you can go and play.

protosprite →MIT · on npm since August 2025

The sprite libraries Tauric Studio runs on: protosprite-core and protosprite-three are dependencies of this app, listed on our licences page like every other. Written by hand, before this project existed.

The Open Sourcerer codebase is 6,249 commits from 28 contributors, starting in January 2021. 260 of them (4%) record an AI co-author, the earliest in February 2026 — so around 96% of it was written before a model touched the repository at all. That repository is private, so you have our method and our number rather than a link.

What crossed into this one is easier to see by capability than by file. Each of these is something the product can do because somebody else did it first, sized by what implements it here now:

Measured by what the product can DO, not by lines copied. Each row below is a capability that exists here because it existed somewhere else first, sized by the code implementing it in this repository today — most of which was written since. The second number is the part that is still literally someone else’s text, and it is usually small: what carries between codebases is a solved problem, not a file.

From Open Sourcerer

User scriptingsrc/scripting, src/studio/scripting: 5,034 lines · 25 files235 still verbatim
Document and undo architecturesrc/editor/editorDoc, editorState, store: 4,416 lines · 15 filesnone of it their text
Tiled map interchangesrc/formats/tiled: 3,327 lines · 15 files242 still verbatim
Typed entity metadatasrc/project/entitySchema, src/studio/inspector: 1,647 lines · 10 files27 still verbatim
Edge ribbon renderingsrc/studio/renderer/edgeRibbon: 303 lines · 1 file14 still verbatim
Tile painting algorithmssrc/editor/algorithms/fillRegion, tileOrientation: 145 lines · 2 files140 still verbatim
Editor keyboard modelsrc/editor/editorKeyboard: 50 lines · 1 file40 still verbatim

From protosprite

Animated sprite renderingsrc/studio/renderer/protoSprite*, over ~6,300 lines of packages: 615 lines · 2 filesnone of it their text

Everyone else — 15 things this implements that somebody else worked out first

Claude learned to write this code from an enormous body of published work. Its authors were not asked, are not listed anywhere, and are owed nothing under any licence — which is a reason to write them down rather than a reason not to. Nobody can enumerate that corpus. What we can enumerate is the specific published work this product implements, so here it is, with links.

This is not the licence page. Everything we ship that carries an actual licence obligation is at /licenses, separately and in full.

Tiled map editor — Thorbjørn Lindeijer and contributors. TMJ, TMX and TSJ — the formats this reads and writes, and the tile-layer model behind them
Yjs — Kevin Jahns. the CRDT the whole document sits in, and the undo manager scoped to it
JS-Interpreter — Neil Fraser. the sandbox a user script runs inside; there is no other way we would have one
three.js — Ricardo Cabello and contributors. every pixel the canvas draws
SVG 1.1 implementation notes — W3C. §F.6.5 — endpoint to centre arc conversion, and the radius correction that stops a malformed arc failing silently
PDF 32000-1 — Adobe, then ISO. the container, the xref table, and the standard-14 font metrics labels are centred with
DXF reference — Autodesk. group codes, the bulge encoding of an arc, and the ELLIPSE entity
PNG specification — W3C and the PNG Working Group. filtering, for the encoder and decoder that let exports run without a browser
GeoJSON, RFC 7946 — IETF. the geometry model, and the coordinate rules we had to decide not to fake
Protocol Buffers — Google. the native save format, and append-only field numbers as a compatibility discipline
Ramer–Douglas–Peucker — Urs Ramer; David Douglas and Thomas Peucker. fitting a traced bitmap to a point budget
Morphological thinning — Zhang and Suen, and everyone since. reducing ink to a skeleton before it is walked into strokes
Polygon triangulation by ear clipping — Meisters, and David Eberly's write-up of it. filling the inside of a closed ring
De Casteljau's algorithm — Paul de Casteljau. splitting a curve, which is how a segment divides and how a ribbon draws itself in
Approximating a circle with Béziers — Spencer Mortensen, and the constant everyone rediscovers. 4/3·tan(Δ/4) — arcs and ellipses as cubics, in export and on screen

Why we work this way

Tauric Studio exists because work made in one tool is stuck in it. A map drawn in Tiled does not open in AutoCAD; a plan drawn in AutoCAD does not become a tile map; and the file that survives every hop between them is usually a picture of the work rather than the work. Fixing that is not a feature. It is ten file formats read and written properly, each carrying as much of the work as it can hold — a great deal of exacting, unglamorous code for a small team to write.

So we write it this way. Empty repository to a deployed editor — protobuf save format, live collaboration, ten formats in and out, a sandboxed scripting layer — in eleven days. The speed is not the point. The point is that a team this size can take on a problem this shape at all.

What that trades away is a particular kind of scrutiny, so that is where the effort goes instead. Every change runs the whole test suite. Anything that touches your files, your data, or someone else’s name is read line by line before it ships.

Questions

info@gnarledhelix.com. Gnarled Helix LLC, gnarledhelix.com.

Counts taken 15 August 2026.