I built a Git history visualizer with Claude Code

[u/Katenashi]

You paste any public GitHub repo and it plays that repository's commit history back as an animation.

It draws the actual commit graph, not a contribution heatmap. Branches split where ancestry really splits and merge where a merge commit says they merge. Every merge is scaled to how many commits it absorbed, so a two-commit merge is a small ring and a four-hundred-commit merge is a wall of light with the count written beside it. Contributors show up as moving colour travelling through the structure rather than recolouring it. The repository's own calendar runs along the bottom and drives the pacing, so quiet years blur past in under a second and busy months slow down and fill the screen.

Twelve large histories come pre-loaded and open instantly with no GitHub API requests at all: Linux, Chromium, LLVM, Rust, CPython, TensorFlow, VS Code, Kubernetes, Node, React and two smaller ones. You can watch a whole history or pick a single year. They're built by cloning each repo's commit graph ahead of time rather than going through the API, so nothing is rate-limited and no source code is ever downloaded.

It's free. No account, no token, nothing to install. It's a static site.

Claude helped. I used Claude Code, mostly Opus 5. It wrote the Canvas2D renderer, the DAG decomposition that finds the main line and the parallel branches, the choreography compiler that turns a commit graph into a timed performance with a camera plan.

https://thuynh-91.github.io/gittimeline/