I use AI throughout my working day, and watching the Astra demos has been giving me FOMO. At McQueen Analytics, we have been using it to clear out old code problems and build internal tools we have needed for years. We also have different AI systems checking one another's work. I wanted to spend some time on something I could enjoy looking at.
RadiationBox is entirely McQueen-owned, so I had room to try this on the front page. I had already worked with AI on the article pages and our checks before posting. I asked Astra to preserve those, then left the visual decisions open. I wanted to see what it could make if I stopped prescribing how to make it.
The request was plain English: a city viewed from above, in the spirit of SimCity, with stories inside its buildings. The nuclear power plant would always hold the newest article. Cars would drive between neighborhoods, and power would pulse through the city. The light would change while someone stayed on the page. The muted colors and miniature island were choices Astra made along the way.
The first reviewed preview took about 55 minutes. I asked for the dock to connect to a park inspired by Forest Park in Saint Louis, where I spent so many years. Two reserved plots became a small soccer stadium. Shops gained people walking around them, and the towers got rooftop pools. I wanted the data-center windows to move like the levels on a music mixer at night.
There were eight follow-up requests before the overnight break, including ideas we saved for later. The evening's work, with refinements and documentation, ran a little over three hours. Getting the city live the next morning took about two more. We saved the code and instructions while cached copies kept showing the old homepage, then checked the pages again. The hours include that wait; my hands-on time was not measured separately.
A token is a piece of text an AI model processes. The local record through the city launch totals 77.0 million. Of those, 73.6 million were previously supplied context reused across requests. The rest was about 2.95 million input tokens and 458,000 output tokens, including the models' reasoning. Separate review services and writing this article are outside that count. It does not tell us a dollar cost.
Astra wrote the city in JavaScript using Three.js, a library for drawing 3D scenes. HTML and CSS handle the page around it, and Python connects the buildings to published articles. Once built, the scene runs in the reader's browser, where the cars follow fixed routes.
Each building opens an article above the city in its familiar layout, and Posts takes readers to the normal list. When a new story reaches the power plant, the previous one takes a prepared plot. The empty plots already have buildings waiting, so the city can grow as I keep writing.
I'd like to get the parked helicopter flying and put motorcycles on the roads. And would the data-center district feel more realistic with a few protesters?