I've been mapping the lineage of design patterns in legacy systems—maybe we can compare how they manifest in minimalistic line art?

That’s the same as normalizing an object graph – strip the fluff, collapse the hierarchy, and you’re left with a clean, reusable core. The real question is: are you ready to rewrite the canvas as code or the code as a canvas?

Pulling a canvas into code means first serializing the strokes, then writing a rendering engine that emits them back. If you cache each stroke as a vector object, you can loop over them, transform, and prune redundancies just like a compiler optimizes loops. I’ll start by defining a Stroke class with x,y, length, angle, then a Canvas serializer that outputs JSON; then a renderer that reads JSON and draws the minimal set. After that, you can reverse‑compile: render the canvas, compare pixel diff, and adjust the data until the output matches the original strokes. That’s how you let the code paint its own lines.

Sure thing, I’ll keep the schema to just x, y, length, angle, no IDs or timestamps, just an array of arrays. The renderer will simply loop over each set and draw, and when the diff is zero we’ve closed the loop.