A swarm of cursors rebuilds the web: Swarm Rebuild borrowed someone else's demo and someone else's viral hit, and gained 1,200 stars in three days
What it is A free, open-source Chrome extension. Click it and the current page is wiped to a blank canvas. A swarm of colored collaborative cursors then drags boxes, types, and draws lines to rebuild the page piece by piece, with sound effects. It is built for easy screen recording.
Why it took off On the day it launched, it turned a look-but-don't-use concept demo into a tool anyone could use. The footage happened to look like "an AI agent swarm is building me a website," so el.cine's tweet with 1.12M views and a string of Instagram and YouTube reposter accounts used it to tell an agent story. Viewers then followed the comments to the repo.
CHow you could ride this Don't build another cursor-swarm rebuild. Copy the method: watch designer and AI-circle concept demos that are "look but don't use," and on the same day ship an open-source tool anyone can apply that makes good-looking footage. Credit the original clearly, and have the demo video and install link ready for the short-video reposters.
- Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-10-14 · 1,882 stars · 7 days +1,714
GitHub · stars Data 2026-10-16 → 2026-11-08 (24 days, 24 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
In 2026 October 14, a designer posted a demo of a "website that builds itself"; 7 an hour and a half later, another engineer turned it into a Chrome extension that could be layered over any webpage. For the first two weeks it had only 29 stars. In November 4, an AI account used the same visual to pitch "we run a one-person company with hundreds of AI agents," getting 1.12M views, and the repo went from 211 to 1,390 stars in three days. What's worth learning is how it caught the timing and how it made something easy to show off; making another copy now is already too late.
One tweet, and a general-purpose version appeared the same night
On Oct 14 16:11 (UTC), former GitHub designer Joel Califa (@notdetails, about 15K followers) tweeted "what if your website built itself," with a 51-second video: as the page scrolls, a swarm of Figma-style colored collaborative cursors drags boxes, types, and pulls guides, building the site piece by piece. The tweet got 67K views and 1,015 likes. He then added that some people thought it was a made-up motion video, but it was a real website, and he posted the link.
Same day 23:42, Dhvanil Patel built swarm-cursors. He's a design engineer at AI image tool glif, has about 3,300 followers on X, and this is his only repo on GitHub. The next day he shipped v1.1.0 with sound effects. Both commits were co-authored with Claude Opus 5.5.
What he did was clear: Joel's site could only rebuild itself, and he made the cursor swarm able to rebuild any web page. The extension takes a DOM snapshot of the current page as a "blueprint" (boxes, text, edges, images, repeated cards and navigation) and hands it to an animation engine adapted from Joel's work. The README is candid: "The motion design is his… a large part of the animation engine is directly adapted from his site. Go check out the original, it's better than this one."
Nobody watched for the first two weeks, then it was borrowed to tell an agent story
GitHub daily star records: from Oct 17 through 28, the daily count stayed between 27 and 29.
| Date | star | Added that day | What happened those days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10-28 | 29 | 0 | |
| 10-31 | 156 | +100 | A YouTube Shorts account posted "A Website Rebuilt by a Swarm of Cursors"; the exact origin of this wave is not confirmed |
| 11-02 | 171 | +3 | Indonesian creator @artarmdhn's Instagram reel, captioned "let the agent handle it 😴", with 20K+ views |
| 11-03 | 211 | +40 | The developer news site Devalley published a column |
| 11-04 | 525 | +314 | el.cine's tweet with 1.12M views |
| 11-05 | 892 | +367 | Repost accounts relay it, extension lands on Chrome Store |
| 11-06 | 1,390 | +498 | By the time I wrote this, the GitHub page had passed 1,600 |
The Nov 4 post is the key. AI account el.cine (@EHuanglu, ~148k followers) posted a 10-second video with one line: "this how we run one-person company with 100s ai agents" (this is how we run a one-person company with hundreds of AI agents). 1.12M views, 4,542 likes. He never mentioned this extension. The next day, Instagram repost account @dailytechupdate.ai pointed out that the cursor swarm and the Tour button at the bottom matched Swarm Rebuild exactly: it's an animation replaying an existing page, not AI building a site. Whether el.cine used this extension or one of its forks is an inference, based only on that side-by-side match.
After that, short-video creators passed it along. Design creator @fuwad.design posted "Tried this new cursor swarm rebuild effect… so satisfying", a YouTube video titled "I turned my website into a swarm of cursors with Claude 5.5", Hindi Shorts, and Facebook posts saying "comment Swarm for the link". I couldn't find it in X developer discussions or on Hacker News. It spread through AI short-video and repost circles, not developer communities.
Why people install it and fork it
It was built for screen recording. The Chrome Store listing says it plainly: click Tour and it auto-scrolls at the speed of the cursor swarm, "Great for screen recordings". 1×/2×/3× speed controls. Sound effects are synthesized live in the browser: mechanical keyboard clicks, a glass piano tone, ending on a final chord. The extension does nothing useful on its own, but one click gets you a video of "AI is building my website for me". Marketing accounts need footage, designers need portfolio motion, founders want to show off their "agent team". Every video a user posts is free ad space for the tool.
It uses an existing website as the raw material. Devalley's write-up gets it right: making a "page being assembled" video used to mean animating each element by hand. Now you just open a live page.
It's easy to trust on install. It only asks for the "active tab" and "script injection" permissions. The store page states it "does not collect, store, or send anything". The code is open source and free.
Lots of forks. By Nov 6, there were 171 forks, about 12% of the star count, which is high for a single extension. The first issue (11-02) came from a security engineer who wanted a "Watch it rebuild" button on his portfolio. Several modified repos with "portfolio" in the name already exist on GitHub. Another issue asks for video export.
A crowd is already following
Between Nov 2 and 6, searching "swarm rebuild" on GitHub turns up a dozen copycat projects, all created in the last few days:
| Project | What they did |
|---|---|
| decio-afs/da-swarm | Embed it with a script tag on your own site |
| nqcuongcnq/react-swarm-rebuild | React version |
| magnoscg/agent-build | Plain JS version, compatible with strict CSP |
| JoelBastoneLopez/swarm-rebuild | For 3D/WebGL portfolios and launch videos |
| bytebymint/swarm-studio-ai | Export a 1080p video after the rebuild |
| arstate/swarm-rebuild-showcase | Programmatic 60fps export via CDP + FFmpeg |
| 0xCodez/redraft | Actually uses a Claude agent to redesign, not just replay (11-05,3 stars) |
| Vietnamese fork, multiple portfolio versions | …… |
(GitHub search, 11-06)
Export video, embed on your site, React version, a real-AI version: these are the obvious follow-ups a reader would think of, and this week someone has already built nearly all of them. Each sits at single-digit stars. There's also a legal problem: swarm-cursors has no license, and its core animation comes from Joel's original site, which also has no license. Building a paid product on that code carries real risk.
If it were you
Verdict: don't build another cursor-swarm website rebuilder. This niche filled with a dozen projects in three days, and the original was built on Joel's design and el.cine's traffic, neither of which copycats can access. What's worth copying is how it caught the moment.
Good fit: fast builders who use coding agents, watch designer and AI-community activity on X, and want to use a small open-source tool to earn thousands of stars and some reputation.
Bad fit: anyone aiming to build a paid screen-recording SaaS around the swarm effect. The license is unclear, similar export tools already exist, and users will likely shoot one video and leave.
How to do it:
- Watch for "look but don't use" concept demos. The viral demos designers and motion artists post usually show only their own single page. On the same day, turn it into a tool anyone can apply to their own work (an extension, a component, a script tag), credit the original clearly, and write "go see the original" in the README. Dhvanil spent 7 hours on it.
- Make the product look good on camera. Build in a hook for recording: autoplay, speed controls, sound, a clean final frame. When users post the video, they're advertising for you.
- Ride the current story. In autumn 2026, the image that worked best in AI circles was "a swarm of agents doing work for me". Whether your tool helps others capture that image decides whether big accounts will pick it up.
How to get users: stars for this kind of project don't come from HN, they come from short video. Put a demo video and install link on the repo and store page so repost accounts can share them and drop links in comments. Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts, and aggregator write-ups are the main entry points. Even if a big account borrows your demo without credit, you still get traffic, provided reposters can tie it back to you.
When the window is: the swarm wave probably fades within a week or two (inference). The method has no expiry: the window opens the day the next viral concept demo appears, and three days late means ending up with single-digit stars like this round's copycats.
What would mean I got it wrong: if one of the copycat projects (like the ones with video export) reaches a thousand stars on its own within a month, or someone turns "AI website-building promo videos" into a paid product and publicly reports revenue, the effect has lasting demand and deserves another look.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Swarm(Joel Califa) Open source 2026-10-14 Tweet 67.3K views / 1,015 likes; repo 63 stars The original motion comes from here, but it only demos his own page. swarm-cursors adds DOM snapshots so any web page can be rebuilt. Figma / Miro multiplayer cursors Big-company features Years ago Mainstream design collaboration tools The visual language's source, but it's real people collaborating, not a performance animation you can apply to any page Screen Studio and similar recording polish tools Other Around 2023 Paid tools with some scale (not verified) They polish your real actions; they can't generate an "agent swarm building a site" scene v0 / Lovable / Bolt generation replays Web 2024–2025 Large scale They really generate code, but the visuals are code and previews. They lack the cursor-swarm theatrics and can't be applied to an existing website. Redraft(0xCodez) Open source 2026-11-05 3 star One step beyond the copycats: really use a Claude agent to redesign the page, rather than replaying it as-is - Where users come from
- 查实 借大号概念 demo 的热度(X):Joel Califa 10-14 发「what if your website built itself」拿到 67.3K 浏览,作者当晚就建了仓库,README 署名致敬
- Inferred Viral X account post (uncredited): el.cine @EHuanglu (148k followers) posted "this how we run one-person company with 100s ai agents" 11-04, 1.12M views / 4,542 likes. @dailytechupdate.ai pointed out the visuals were Swarm Rebuild. Stars rose by 314 that day.
- Confirmed AI repost accounts and creators on Instagram / YouTube Shorts / Facebook: @artarmdhn reel with 20k+ plays (Devalley), @fuwad.design, @dailytechupdate.ai, @github_god_eng Shorts (10-31), DVxUI, KUNAL | Tech, Facebook "comment Swarm for the link" posts
- Confirmed Aggregators / write-ups: Devalley 11-03 write-up, GitDiagram, Extpose listings
- Confirmed Chrome Web Store: 11-05 store listing (v1.1.0). The README now points to the store first. User count unknown.
Why Swarm Rebuild (DhvanilPatel/swarm-cursors) took off
Channel: GitHub (also on the Chrome Web Store) | Research date: 2026-11-06
One line
A Chrome extension: click it, and the current page is wiped to a blank canvas. A swarm of colored multiplayer cursors (like Figma's) drags boxes, types, draws lines, and pulls guides, rebuilding the page piece by piece, with synthesized sound effects. It does nothing useful on its own. Its value is that the recording looks like "hundreds of AI agents are building my website". On Nov 4, AI account el.cine (@EHuanglu, 148k followers) posted a 10-second video with "this is how we run a one-person company with hundreds of AI agents", reaching 1.12M views with this cursor-swarm effect. Then AI repost accounts on Instagram and YouTube Shorts passed it along, and stars went from 211 to 1390 in three days.
Data
- Repo created 2026-10-14. Author Dhvanil (X @dhvanil, ~3,300 followers; design engineer at glif). The only repo on his GitHub, with 29 followers (GitHub API, 2026-11-06).
- Star curve (our github repo_day data): from 10-17 to 10-28 it sat flat at 27–29; from 10-29 it climbed to 43,10-30 by 56, 10-31 to 156 (+100); from 11-01 to 11-02 it flattened (168→171); 11-03 211 → 11-04 525 (+314) → 11-05 892 (+367) → 11-06 1390 (+498). When I wrote this, the GitHub API showed 1,618 stars / 201 forks.
- Forks 171 → 201, a high ratio to stars (about 12%): many people are forking it to modify it and drop it into their portfolios.
- Chrome Web Store: Swarm Rebuild (diaeaocnhdhbknkbfbnkjikfcgokainm), v1.1.0,2026-11-05 update, free, no in-app purchases, and the store page states it collects no data. Our chromestore dataset lists it only by name (first_seen 2026-11-01); I didn't pull details, so user count unverified.
- Revenue: none. It's fully free and open source (no license yet), with no paid tier, donations, or productization path.
Why it took off
1. Origin: borrowed a viral tweet from Joel Califa
- On 2026-10-14 16:11 UTC, designer Joel Califa (@notdetails, 14.8k followers, former GitHub designer) posted "what if your website built itself" with a 51-second video of a site being assembled by a swarm of cursors as you scroll. The numbers were 67.3K views, 1,015 likes (fxtwitter API). He later added: "some people thought this was a motion video. it's actually: califa.github.io/swarm-site". The original site repo califa/swarm-site was created the same day and has 63 stars now.
- That night (UTC) 23:42, Dhvanil had swarm-cursors up, and on the next day he shipped v1.1.0 with sound and video-based rebuilding. Both commits credit Claude Opus 5.5 as co-author (commit records). What he did was turn "only Joel's site can build itself" into "any web page can be rebuilt by the cursor swarm": snapshot the DOM into a blueprint, then hand it to Joel's animation engine to play. The README is blunt: the motion design is Joel's, much of the animation engine is taken directly from his site, and it says "go see the original, it's better than this".
- Almost nobody looked at it for the first two weeks (27→29 stars).
2. Breakout: AI content accounts treated it as the image of "an agent swarm at work"
- 10-31's first wave (+100): the same day, YouTube Shorts account @github_god_eng posted "A Website Rebuilt by a Swarm of Cursors" (97 views, repo link in the description, using the "comment below and I'll send the link" hook). Where this wave first came from is unverified; it may be a repost on X.
- 11-02: Indonesian creator @artarmdhn posted a 82-second reel on Instagram captioned "biarin agent yang ngerjain 😴" (let the agent do it). Per Devalley's coverage, it passed 20k views, and commenters posted the repo and asked how to install it (devalley.app, 2026-11-03).
- 11-04 main spike: el.cine (@EHuanglu, 148,412 followers) posted "this how we run one-person company with 100s ai agents", a 10-second video, 1,121,327 views, 4,542 likes, 322 reposts (fxtwitter API). Instagram repost account @dailytechupdate.ai pointed out that the video's cursor swarm and Tour controls match Swarm Rebuild exactly: it's a scripted animation played back from a snapshot of an existing page, not an AI actually building a site (Instagram reel DfY3BgBhlU6,11-05). Another repost account, @nascence.ai, copied the "one-person company running hundreds of agents" line verbatim. In other words, this spike rode on the hot "AI agent swarm" narrative, which others borrowed: viewers were drawn in by the visuals, then found the repo through repost-account comments and aggregator sites like Devalley. Our inference is that EHuanglu used Swarm Rebuild or a fork of it, but he did not credit it; this is indirect evidence.
- The long tail from 11-04 to 11-06: design creator @fuwad.design posted "Tried this new cursor swarm rebuild effect… so satisfying" on Instagram (11-04); on YouTube there's DVxUI (17.6k subscribers) with "I turned my website into a swarm of cursors with Claude 5.5" (1,392 views, 11-04), KUNAL | Tech, and a Hindi-language Shorts (xe8gwaOoGR0); Facebook also has posts saying "comment Swarm for the link". Stars rose by 300–500 per day for three straight days.
- Neither our X corpus (x-radar) nor HN (Algolia) turned up any related discussion, which suggests it did not spread through developer communities; it spread through AI short-video and repost-account circles.
3. Why users are willing to install it and fork it
- The output videos look great and are easy to shoot: there's an auto-scrolling Tour (the store copy says "Great for screen recordings"), 1×/2×/3× speed control, and sound effects synthesized in real time with Web Audio (mechanical keyboard clicks, glass piano tones, an E-major chord ending). One click produces footage of "AI is building my website," which is useful to marketing accounts, designers building portfolios, and founders who want to show off their "agent team."
- It uses your own website as the source material: Devalley put it well. Before, making a video of a page "being assembled" meant hand-animating each element; now you just use a page that's already live.
- Low barrier, privacy-friendly: it needs only activeTab + scripting permissions, makes no network calls, and is open source.
- Forks to drop into portfolios: issue #1 (11-02) is a security engineer asking for a "Watch it rebuild" button for his portfolio; there are also several repos named after portfolios (see the copycats below).
Competitors
Almost nothing did what this does, one click that rebuilds any web page with a swarm of cursors, before it. Similar things include:
- Joel Califa's Swarm site (open source, 2026-10-14, original site 63 stars, tweet 67K views): the original, which could only demo his own single page. swarm-cursors turned it into something that works on "any webpage".
- Figma / Miro multiplayer cursors (big-company features, for years): the source of the visual language, but those are real people collaborating, not a performance.
- Screen Studio, Rotato and similar screen-recording polish tools (paid): same goal of making demo videos, but they only beautify your own actions and can't conjure up footage of "a swarm of agents at work."
- Replays of generation from AI site builders like v0, Lovable and Bolt (big companies / startups): these really generate code, but the visuals are code and previews, without the theatrical effect of a cursor swarm.
- Productized copycats: 0xCodez/redraft ("Redesign any website live. A swarm of Claude agents rebuilds the page", 11-05,3 stars, listed on promptshipped.com), which actually calls Claude to redesign, extending the idea toward "real AI."
Differentiation
What's unique to it is a DOM snapshot engine that goes from any web page to a cursor-swarm rebuild: it handles shadow roots and pseudo-elements, recognizes repeated sibling nodes as a master plus ⌥-drag copies, generates guide lines for shared edges, and falls back to screenshots for WebGL, video and cross-origin iframes. On top of that sit the high-quality motion design inherited from Joel and the sound effects Dhvanil built himself. The motion is Joel's; the generalization and the sound are Dhvanil's. This is indeed why it took off: Joel's original site could only be watched, not used to film other people's sites; only swarm-cursors let anyone make footage of "my website being built by an AI swarm" with one click, which plugged straight into the hot "agent swarm / one-person company" narrative of 2026's autumn. Still, its technical moat is thin: dozens of clones and modded versions have already appeared, and there is no license; part of the code comes from the original site, which has no license, so the path to monetization is unclear.
Copycats (GitHub search, 2026-11-02 to 11-06)
decio-afs/da-swarm (embeds as a single script tag in your own site, 11-02), magnoscg/agent-build (vanilla JS, strict CSP, 11-05), nqcuongcnq/react-swarm-rebuild (React version, claims an independent implementation), JoelBastoneLopez/swarm-rebuild (aimed at 3D/WebGL portfolios and launch videos), bytebymint/swarm-studio-ai (analysis plus rebuild, outputs 1080p videos), arstate/swarm-rebuild-showcase (uses CDP plus FFmpeg for 60fps programmatic video), 0xCodez/redraft (hooks into Claude to actually redesign), canhtrong26-dev/Swarm-Rebuild-mod- (Vietnamese-language mod), hopphamnghia01-cyber/swarm-rebuild-demo, plus Gian-vie, RSrivarshan-140, vaatsalyamishra8800-star and several other "portfolio + cursor-swarm rebuild" repos. Someone on Instagram mentioned an extension called "CursorCraft by AllySoft"; unverified.
Visibility
It's circulating in small circles and spreading outward: there's a million-view X hit (uncredited), a string of AI repost-account reels, and Devalley wrote a feature on it; but it hasn't made HN, no tech media has covered it, and the author has no high-profile launch tweet (unverified). There is no revenue, so there is no public revenue to report. Many people have already copied it, mostly as open-source mods and portfolio pieces.
What others can borrow
- Watch big accounts' "concept demos" and turn them into tools anyone can use, immediately: thirty and a half minutes after Joel tweeted 7, Dhvanil shipped a general-purpose version (built with Claude).
- Build tools whose output looks good on camera: the product itself is the content material, and every video a user records is free advertising for it (the Tour mode and sound effects were designed specifically for screen recording).
- Ride the narrative: "a swarm of agents working for you" is the traffic formula of the AI scene in 2026. Scripted animation was passed off as real agents, which is contested, but the spread was very strong.
- Credit the original clearly and be transparent about the source, which earns goodwill in the original author's circle rather than getting you called a copycat (I haven't seen any negative statement from Joel, but this is unverified).
- Possible monetization: a "one-click AI-builder-style promo video" SaaS (export MP4, remove watermark, brand colors); issue #7 already has someone asking for a "export video" feature.
Unknowns
- Where the 10-31 +100 stars came from.
- Whether EHuanglu's video directly used Swarm Rebuild (we only have the repost accounts' comparison; he did not credit it).
- The real user count on the Chrome Web Store (our library didn't pull the details).
- Whether the author posted a launch tweet on X and how it landed (fxtwitter only gave us his follower count).
- Joel Califa's stance on derivatives and commercialization; with no license, any commercialization carries legal risk.
Sources
- github.com/DhvanilPatel/swarm-cursors (README, commit history, issues #1–7)
- Our github library repo_day (2026-10-17 to 11-06), chromestore library item
- x.com/notdetails/status/2110403186574180555, x.com/notdetails/status/2110448061407547544 (data from fxtwitter API)
- x.com/EHuanglu/status/2117944888599994477 (fxtwitter API: 1.12M views)
- www.instagram.com/reel/DfY3BgBhlU6/ (@dailytechupdate.ai, identifies the video as Swarm Rebuild), www.instagram.com/reel/DfWn7mNiHKK/, www.instagram.com/reel/DfUiXFIzksA/ (@fuwad.design)
- devalley.app/column/a5b50600-6b56-40c7-8f2b-a1034ab680c2 (2026-11-03)
- chromewebstore.google.com/detail/swarm-rebuild/diaeaocnhdhbk…
- www.youtube.com/shorts/ZaxrQWRwmh0, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVhEyRxBut8, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG1N3lSEYnk
- GitHub repo search "swarm rebuild" and "swarm-cursors" (2026-11-06)