Inside the AI Core hero animation

One of the more fun technical details on this site is the particle network in the homepage hero — the “AI Core” visual. Here’s roughly how it works, and why it was built the way it was.

What it’s doing

A set of points drift slowly across the hero canvas. When two points are close enough, a faint line connects them — the closer they are, the more visible the line. Move your mouse near them and they gently push away, like a soft magnetic field.

Why it’s built this way

A few deliberate choices went into it:

  • It respects reduced-motion settings. If your system has “reduce motion” turned on, the animation simply doesn’t run — no exceptions, no half-measures.
  • It’s lighter on mobile. Touch devices get roughly half as many particles, since there’s no mouse to interact with and phones have less headroom for background animation.
  • It’s decorative, not decorative-and-misleading. It doesn’t pretend to represent real infrastructure or data — it’s a mood, not a dashboard.

Small details like this rarely get noticed directly, but they’re the difference between a site that feels considered and one that feels like a template with some particles bolted on.