whoisda has released Sigil, an experimental drawing tool that runs in the browser. Unlike Photoshop or Procreate, it isn't built to help you finish a picture; it strips drawing back to its rawest impulse — scribble, push shapes around, stumble into something you never intended to make. Hold the spacebar and a radial menu floats up, letting you adjust brush radius and flow without leaving the canvas; there's a symmetry mode, custom "pull" shape-brushes you can drag onto the page, and a distraction-free mode where the interface dissolves entirely. Its lineage is unambiguous — it descends from Alchemy and Webchemy, that small tradition of deliberately anti-workflow drawing experiments. The whole thing is open source, and the author marks it explicitly: no generative AI was used.

In SAE terms, mainstream drawing software is a textbook already-construct. It has frozen the goal of "produce a finished work" into layers, undo stacks, brush presets, export formats — every control on the screen is sediment left behind after some past chisel-construct cycle (凿构循环) closed. These tools are efficient, reliable, enshrined; but for exactly that reason they no longer produce remainders. Everything you can do with them has already been named, absorbed, drawn into its assigned cell on the grid.

What Sigil does is pick that chisel back up. Alchemy's removal of undo, its way of letting a line escape intention, was itself a strike against the construct of finished drawing. Sigil carries that strike into the modern browser — and what it aims at is not the artwork but the remainder itself (余项): the forms not yet absorbed into a style, not yet named. It is not an output tool; it is an apparatus for keeping the remainder open. Every shape you make stays suspended in the "not yet digested" state. This is the purest face of the beauty of the remainder — the beauty lives not in the product but in a process that hasn't been closed.

And seeing it now matters more than seeing it later. Alchemy is already an already-construct in the history of creative coding — written into tutorials, endlessly cited, a safe reference point. Sigil still reads "in development": the author is still adding sound input, still wrestling with native-app signing certificates, its logic still growing, with no complete and stable name yet. Once it gets filed away in the drawer marked "just another Alchemy remake," the remainder dies and hardens into construct. While it's still alive — still a form the name hasn't closed around — look now.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics