// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: A desktop fly drawn to the scent of vibecode
A 3D fruit fly that lives on your macOS desktop — driven by a live spiking
simulation of the real FlyWire
connectome. It walks across your windows, grooms, sleeps, and decides to flee
your cursor with the same neurons a real fly uses.
Fork of DenisSergeevitch/desktop-fly
— this one gives the fly a sense of smell for vibecode.
It scans your disk for agent markers (AGENTS.md,
CLAUDE.md, .cursor/rules, .kiro/steering
and ~40 more) and turns anything on screen that leads to them into an odour
source: an editor or terminal window with the project open, a row in the front
Finder window, a folder icon on the desktop. An open project smells strongest,
a closed icon weakest, and the reach of each grows with how much vibecode it
holds — a hub of six marked repos is smelled across the whole screen, a single
weak folder only from nearby. The steering neurons then walk the fly there,
and when the smell is far the population wakes up enough to make it fly.
The fly's brain window: 23,210 real neuron soma positions from FlyWire v783,
with live spikes flashing at real neuron locations. The two glowing yellow
markers are the Giant Fibers — the escape command neurons. Click any region
to stimulate it.
The body itself is procedural (FlyWire is a brain connectome — no body
geometry exists), with a tripod gait, visible wing-beat, altitude-scaled
flight, grooming, and sleep postures.
Requirements: macOS 13+, Xcode Command Line Tools (Swift 5.9+).
No permissions or entitlements needed — everything it senses
(cursor, window frames, clicks-as-taps, thermal state) is permission-free.
A 🪰 item appears in the menu bar; quit from there. The fly wanders your
desktop on a transparent, click-through overlay — it never intercepts your
mouse or keyboard.
The brain window is interactive: hovering pauses the rotation; clicking a
region "optogenetically" stimulates the ~60 nearest circuit neurons for
400 ms. The fly's reaction is whatever the real network does downstream —
click the Giant Fiber and it escapes; click DNg11 and it grooms; click one
side's DNa01/02 and it turns.
The loop also closes body→brain: the gait rhythm feeds the circuit's real
ascending (proprioceptive) neurons in phase with the legs, and fast cursor
motion stimulates its sensory (wind) partners.
data/ ships with compact derived files. To rebuild them from the raw
FlyWire Codex dumps (~60 MB download):