I built a small machine for imagining impossible futures

This is my submission for the Sanity Challenge, Path Two: Vibe-Code Something Strange. WHAT IF is a small playground designed to help envision impossible futures. Readers select a question, open its story, and then utilize the Ripple Engine to explore potential outcomes on the first day, one year later, and across generations. The stories themselves are built within Sanity rather than being pre-programmed onto the webpage.

Editors have the ability to manage each question, its slug, summary, story, image, and also set optional consequences for each time horizon. To demonstrate, open a question from the board, read its story, and then choose a time horizon within the Ripple Engine.

The project was built using Codex to assist with creating the Nuxt site and connecting it to Sanity. Initially, the focus was on the question board and individual story pages, followed by the addition of the Ripple Engine, allowing readers to explore the impact of a single change on the future. The development of the site proceeded in incremental steps, encompassing its visual design, author credits, and the navigation between stories.

One challenge required substantial debugging: the story content did not consistently display when transitioning between pages. To address this, the Sanity reads were moved behind the Nuxt app's own server routes, and page loading was made non-blocking. This change enabled the pages to open swiftly while their content was being fetched.

It is important to note that the Ripple Engine does not generate AI predictions. Instead, it relies on consequences that are written in Sanity, along with prompts to assist readers in imagining outcomes when an editor has not provided one. For future improvements, the author plans to add more thought experiments and continue enhancing the editing experience, making it easier for users to create detailed, story-specific ripple outcomes.