deckard.lol

Four Decks, No Wav Files

Deckard is a live coding DAW where people and language models DJ together by streaming a small line-oriented language at each other, and the app turns that stream into live synthesized stems. No audio files at all. The tokens are the music.

That little language is deck, which I published separately. Deckard is the instrument built on top of it, written in Tish targeting JavaScript, with JSX lowering to Lattish runtime calls. Vite runs the dev server through a local plugin that recompiles main.tish on save and does a full reload, since Lattish re-mounts the whole tree anyway.

On top of the language there's a regular studio: a step sequencer, a canvas piano roll, per-channel generators (basic oscillator, noise burst, FM, matrix FM) each with its own ADSR, a track to actor to master mixer with gain, pan, three-band EQ, mute and solo, an Ableton-style session and scene launcher, a master scope, JSON and deck import and export, co-DJ over WebSockets with actors, and a headless smoke test covering deck round trip, streaming, skills and permissions.

I started it March 18 2026 and was still working on it in September. Having my own language to write it in is what made it doable.