What it is
recursive.eco is a place to make, share and use grammars.
Tarot decks, story playlists, books, courses, to reflect alone or with an AI. Explore what people made, sit with it in your Journal, make your own in Create. No ads, no likes race.
Structures · Process · Possibilities
A never-ending cycle, in three places.
Explore
structures
The inherited forms: the grammars people made and published, and free courses.
Explore the history of an old grammar format: Tarot- One building block. A grammar is a set of items. A collection is a grammar whose items link to other grammars. A selection is a pick inside one grammar.
- Many views, one assistant. The same grammar opens as Cards, Playlist, Tree or Print, and one assistant works across all of it.
How it is built, and the open source it stands on: How recursive.eco is built.
What the platform does
Features we are testing
Under the principles of recursive eco improvement, written down in the Manifest.
Private mode
Journal or create without our database at all. Write, export, keep it where you feel safe, reimport when you want it back.
Star
A way to keep something. Starring puts a grammar in your Starred collection. The count says how many people keep it, like a star on GitHub; nothing here rewards chasing it.
Private, Link, Published
Three visibilities, chosen per grammar. Private is yours and the people you invite, Published sits in Explore, and Link is unlisted — reachable by anyone you give the link to, and nobody else.
Your Profile and Follow
A page of the things you chose, public if you want it to be, with collections you name. People who want to know when it changes can follow it.
Focus mode
One grammar and nothing else, in the order somebody chose: no sign-in, no recommendations, no outbound link a child can follow. Built for kids and for rooms.
Open format
We allow for, and create, open source repos and content others can fork. The shape every grammar is built on is documented in the grammar format spec (Apache-2.0), and a study that grows up gets a repo of its own — the Recursive Tarot is the one to read first.
Your data
Export it or delete it at any time. What you make belongs to you, and leaving should cost you nothing but the decision.
Pay-as-you-go AI
Everything without AI is free: cast oracles, create decks and books, save readings, print and export. AI is pay-as-you-go, at cost plus a margin that keeps the lights on. Heavy database use may be charged the same way; the tools themselves stay free. No third-party ads: visitors who are not signed in may see a few short ads of our own, for recursive.eco itself (see them all here).
Why it is built this way
Why I build it, and the principles we hold to: the Manifest. How much of this was made with AI, and what that means for trusting it: AI Risks & Safer Containers.
Content & Licensing
We are trying to build the cell membrane as we go — selectively permeable, in good faith, with whatever judgment we have at the moment. The platform features traditional content (tarot, I Ching, astrology, public-domain literature) and content from other creators (their decks, books, stories, playlists). We try to be generative with that material and to keep finding out what working with it well actually means.
Below is our current understanding of how to work with creators' content fairly. This is not legal counsel; it is a working disclosure.
What you create is yours
Each grammar belongs to the person who made it. Videos, texts and images from other creators remain theirs. Your interpretations, translations, commentary, and notes are your original creative work. When you share a grammar you choose its licence, the way a GitHub repo does — CC-BY-SA-4.0 by default (share-alike with attribution), forkable by others with credit back to you.
YouTube embeds & creator opt-out
When a grammar includes a YouTube video, we render it via YouTube's own embed. Creators control whether their videos are embeddable from inside YouTube's own settings; if a creator turns embedding off, the video stops appearing on the platform. We rely on that opt-out as the consent signal — we are not bypassing it, and we honor it when it changes.
Music grammars & caption lyrics
Track metadata (artist names, album titles) is factual information. Lyrics pulled from YouTube auto-captions are machine-generated approximations — not a copyright loophole. Captions being machine-generated does not make a song's lyrics uncopyrighted. We use them as study aids alongside the embedded video; we do not redistribute audio; we use best judgment about how much to display. If a creator or rights-holder asks us to remove specific material, we remove it.
Accountability
If something on this platform is using your work in a way that does not feel right, write to pp@playfulprocess.com. We take down first and discuss after.
Important Notices
Not a substitute for professional care
These tools are for personal reflection. Not therapy, medical advice, or diagnosis. If you are in crisis: 988 (US), text HOME to 741741, or call 911.
Beta
A living experiment. Expect bugs, unfinished features, and breaking changes.
AI outputs & your agreement
AI features can produce inaccurate or fabricated ("hallucinated") output — verify anything you rely on, and treat it as creative/reflective, not professional advice. By using recursive.eco you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
We see life as patterns unfolding this way — and sometimes we play with the idea artistically.