Manim is a Python animation engine designed to build animated mathematical explainer videos (examples here) created by Grant Sanderson of the superb YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown.

A couple years ago I wanted to write my own mathematics explainer videos with Manim, but found the learning curve to be pretty steep at the outset.

The user experience has since improved dramatically - in large part because of the Manim Community Edition, but also because there’s now enough samples in recent LLM training runs that they can produce workable Manim code!

I stumbled across a neat website (GitHub) that allows you to prompt either a SOTA LLM or a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model and have Manim code generated and rendered in-browser. The quality is passable at best (and I’ve observed better results prompting whatever default model ChatGPT is serving up as of writing), but the barrier to entry just dropped remarkably. I can jump right in with a MVP and start tweaking!

Also shoutout to a cool project I stumbled along on the way: ManimWeb, a Dart-backed engine to build interactive maths animations for the web. Development seems to have died a few years ago, but the Fourier Transform example is neat to play around with.