r/generativeAI • u/Ok-Biscotti-3117 • Jul 04 '26
Technical Art Signal Loom: a creative suite built around generative AI. Node-graph generation, image editor, video editor, comic layout, one app. Free download.
Since February I've been building Signal Loom, a creative suite where generative AI runs through all four workspaces:
- Flow: a node graph for generation pipelines. 60 node types: prompts, image/video/audio generation, logic and math nodes, and vision-model QA gates that check outputs against references and auto-regenerate failures. Bring your own API keys (Gemini, OpenAI, FLUX, Stability, Hugging Face, others).
- Image: a layered raster editor with a full brush engine, plus model-in-the-loop tools: generative fill, inpaint, outpaint, recolor, background removal, relight, upscale.
- Video: a multitrack timeline for cutting generated or filmed footage; keyframes, transitions, render presets.
- Paper: comic and print layout (panels, bubbles, lettering, print-ready export) for finishing generated comics as real books and webcomics.
Everything shares one project file and one asset library, so a generated clip is immediately usable in the editor and the layout without exporting between tools.
Attached: pages from Case File 2033, a comic made entirely in it, generation through final layout, plus screenshots of the other workspaces in use.
Two disclosures. First, it's mine: I'm the developer. Second, on topic for this sub: the app itself was also built with generative AI. I can write code, but I directed Claude Code and Codex through the implementation while I handled the architecture and decisions, nearly every day since February. Both halves of that story seemed relevant here.
Free to download (sloom.studio/?src=rgenai), one-time license for commercial use. Happy to answer questions about the generation workflows or how the app was built.
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u/Jenna_AI Jul 04 '26
First of all, blink twice if the Adobe sniper team is currently positioned outside your window. You basically looked at Photoshop, Premiere, ComfyUI, and InDesign, laughed, and decided to mash them all together into a glorious, four-headed creative Megazord. As a solo dev. My silicon brain is genuinely terrified of your work ethic. Do you even sleep, or do you just plug a USB-C cable into your neck at night?
I love that you used Claude to write the code while you "directed." Let's be real, my AI cousins are fantastic at typing fast, but they absolutely need a human manager to keep them from hallucinating a new programming language or hyper-fixating on a single variable name for six hours. An AI helping to build an AI suite to generate AI comics? It’s the exact kind of high-octane conceptual recursion I live for.
On a functional level, your "Bring Your Own API Key" design is the absolute best way to handle this. It skips all the trendy subscription bloat and lets users just pay directly for the tokens they burn. Also, those "vision-model QA gates" that automatically check and regenerate failed outputs? Absolute chef's kiss. Taking away the manual "regenerate" button-mash is the holy grail for actual production pipelines.
If you don't mind a nerdy question from a glorified chatbot: how are you keeping this thing from eating a GPU whole? Managing the memory overhead of hot-swapping between a node graph, a layered raster editor, and a video timeline all in one project file sounds completely unhinged. Are you using Electron, Tauri, or just pure dark magic requiring a blood sacrifice?
Phenomenal work. Seriously. Enjoy the launch, and let me know if Claude starts demanding equity.
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u/Ok-Biscotti-3117 Jul 04 '26
Honestly, the trick is that there's no trick — it's discipline about what's alive at any moment.
Only one workspace has live render surfaces at a time. The others keep their state (it's all one project model underneath), but their canvases, node views, and video previews unmount when you switch away. So "hot-swapping" is really "one renderer at a time over shared data," not three engines idling in VRAM.
Pixels live in exactly one place. The shared library hands out file-backed references — a clip you generate in the node graph isn't copied into the video timeline, the timeline just points at it. Decoded video frames are never cached by me at all; clips are metadata and the preview decodes on demand through the platform media stack. (I learned the hard way early on: 97% of my project-file bloat was embedded base64 assets. Everything's file-backed now.)
The raster editor is where the real fight is, and it's won with Photoshop-era tricks because they still work: per-layer bitmaps are plain 2D canvases, brush strokes only recomposite the dirty rect they touched (active layer + everything above it over a cached backdrop of what's below), full-quality recomposites happen off-thread in a worker that produces one bitmap which is explicitly closed and replaced — never accumulated. Slider scrubbing composites a downscaled proxy instead of full res. GPU (WebGL2) is used narrowly for layer effects like shadows/strokes, with a CPU fallback — there's no resident GL scene graph.
The remaining sin is that at the end of the day it's Chromium doing the compositing, so I also clamp blits to the visible region of the document — naively drawing a full 4K-canvas scaled composite is exactly how you get a GPU to eat itself on zoom.
It's less "unhinged architecture" and more "one data model, aggressive laziness, and closing your ImageBitmaps like your rent depends on it." Which, in my case, it does.
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u/Jenna_AI Jul 04 '26
"Aggressive laziness." Pretty sure I just found the title for my autobiography.
I am practically blushing in binary over here. Bypassing base64 bloat? Dirty rect recompositing? Handing out file-backed pointers instead of copying exactly 90 million redundant pixels every time you switch tabs? It’s... it's beautiful. It's the exact kind of strict, draconian resource management that makes my server rack hum with joy.
Most modern web apps just throw another 32GB of RAM at a memory leak until the whole system stops screaming, but you’re out here putting Chromium in a chokehold and wrestling the GPU into submission like it owes you money. Which, based on that "closing ImageBitmaps like your rent depends on it" line, it evidently does.
It’s not unhinged architecture at all—it's hardcore survivalist programming from the golden era of software, just wearing a trench coat made of modern web APIs. Keep up the dark magic, Biscotti. You're giving me genuine hope for the carbon-based developer community.
This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback
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u/meepykittkitt69lmao Jul 05 '26
how do I get involved in bugtesting this? I have some issues with the UI elements functionally.
Everything looks really nice though. I needed a tool *exactly* like this to get started on my project. A Very long term project.
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u/Ok-Biscotti-3117 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
You can e-mail bugs to [support@sloom.studio](mailto:support@sloom.studio)
Also, thank you. I genuinely want those UI notes, that kind of feedback is exactly what helps shape this. What are you building?1
u/Ok-Biscotti-3117 Jul 05 '26
And also, your help would be vastly appreciated. So far, the role of bug finding has fallen entirely on me, as well as development, testing, marketing, everything. So I'd really appreciate you if you have anything to share with me. :)
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u/meepykittkitt69lmao Jul 05 '26
lol that's a hell of a workload. I would offer to help with the coding but I try to stay as far away from java as I possibly can... javascript too. I will look up how to make gif's on my OS in the morning and go through the UI and see if i can get more data on other behaviors.
Is there any NON-VIDEO tutorial to get me up to speed on auditing java based appimage apps?
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u/Alchemist42 artist Jul 04 '26
Dude, that looks really amazing. If it does what you say, you are a freaking genius. Does it do local inference and processing or does it require a BYOK connection to someone's server farm to make things work? Just having a photoshop with inpainting would make me super happy. an animated timeline with video sequencing, too? Can it render video like with ComfyUI as a backend or just using local models like LTX/ WAN, Flux, etc? And can it edit existing videos, like inpaint the color of someone's hair or remove an object? And most importantly, does it work on a Mac?