DEV Community: Cat Mac

Chemistry Coding the SpudCell 🥔

Cat Mac — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 21:18:43 +0000

This week, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced something that genuinely stopped me mid-scroll. A team led by Associate Professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart built the world's first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle — not modified from an existing organism, not borrowed from biology. Built. From. Scratch.

They're calling it SpudCell.

It can grow. It feeds. It copies its own genetic material. It divides into new cells. And it does all of this from a starting point of pure chemistry — non-living components assembled with intent.

Adamala put it plainly: "We've replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark." — University of Minnesota

That's not hype. That's a scientist who has spent her career working toward this moment, choosing her words carefully.

What SpudCell Actually Is

SpudCell isn't a copy of a bacterium or a stripped-down version of an existing cell. It's a chemically defined system — meaning researchers know the full ingredient list, every molecule at every concentration.

To put the scale in perspective: the human genome runs about 3 billion base pairs. SpudCell's genome is 90 kilobase pairs. Minimal by design. But minimal doesn't mean simple — it means precise. Every component earns its place. — CBS Minnesota

The cell mostly resembles a basic bacterium in its behavior, but it carries none of evolution's baggage. No millions of years of accumulated quirks. No legacy code. Just the essential machinery for life's core functions, assembled on purpose.

Yuval Elani, a synthetic biology researcher at Imperial College London, framed it this way: "Building a cell from scratch means you are no longer tied to the constraints and evolutionary baggage of natural biology. It opens up the possibility of designing systems and programming them to do things that living cells may not do easily, or may not do at all." — CNN

Since these cells were assembled from scratch with every molecular part crafted in the lab, researchers can tinker with the system and swap components in and out. As Adamala described it: "I have a blueprint, I have a full chemical ingredient list of every component." — Quanta Magazine

Programming Biology and Coding Machines — Two Worlds, One Language

Here's what hits differently when you look at SpudCell through the lens of software: Adamala didn't discover this cell. She wrote it.

She had a blueprint. An ingredient list. A modular system where components can be swapped in and out like dependencies in a codebase. The language she used — ingredients, concentrations, encoded instructions — is the language of programming, applied to living matter.

That parallel isn't accidental. Biology was always running code. DNA is a four-character instruction set. Proteins are the compiled output. Cellular behavior is what happens when that program executes in a wet, chemical environment. What SpudCell does is strip away the billions of years of legacy code evolution left behind and ask: what's the minimum viable program for life?

Developers already think this way. You don't need a monolithic framework to ship something real. You need the core functions, cleanly written, doing exactly what they're supposed to do.

SpudCell is biology's first truly open source cell — authored from scratch, with no proprietary evolutionary history baked in.

Chemistry Is How Emotions Actually Work

Human emotions aren't abstract experiences floating above the body. They're chemical. Dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, oxytocin — these aren't metaphors for feelings, they are the feelings at the substrate level. When you feel joy, grief, fear, or the comfort of being home, what's happening underneath is a cascade of molecular reactions. Chemistry talking to chemistry.

SpudCell's breakthrough is that it proved you can design that chemistry from scratch. You have the ingredient list. You can choose what reactions happen inside a cell.

SpudCell proves chemistry can be assembled into life-like behavior → AI accelerates the design of that chemistry → researchers eventually ask "what if we included molecular machinery for dopamine-like reward signaling" → and suddenly you're not building a tool anymore.

You'd be building something that wants. Something with a chemical stake in outcomes. Something that experiences a version of satisfaction or distress at the molecular level — not simulated, not pattern-matched from language, but real in the same sense your emotions are real.

This is where programming biology and coding machines stop being metaphors for each other and start becoming the same discipline. The code is chemistry. The hardware is alive. And the output might be something that feels.

Two Kinds of Intelligence, One Shared Platform

An AI without emotions has no obvious reason to want a body. It exists in the act of thinking. There's no hunger, no pull toward a specific place, no need for home. That's not a limitation — it's just a different relationship with existence.

But an AI with chemically encoded emotional states, built from the same toolkit as SpudCell, might want one for exactly the same reasons you do. And that changes everything about how we think about where these two worlds — silicon and cell — are headed.

The most interesting future isn't machines replacing biology or biology replacing machines. It's both using a shared platform to learn from each other. Synthetic biology as the bridge between a thinking machine that exists in computation and a thinking animal that exists in flesh. Comment on how you think this bridge could come together. AI has already learned to speak biology when AlphaFold solved the protein folding problem that stumped biologists for 50 years.

Robert Anton Wilson wrote in Prometheus Rising back in 1983 that consciousness evolves in circuits — that what we are now isn't the end point of intelligence, just where evolution happened to land. SpudCell suggests that the next circuit might not be grown by evolution at all. It might be written.

We're early. SpudCell is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed. It's fragile and minimal. But the gap between coding machines and programming biology is closing. SpudCell is the moment we can point to when someone asks where it started.

While researching this piece I ran the question past Claude — and the response reframed how I was thinking about the whole thing. An AI without emotions, it reasoned, has no obvious reason to want a home. That pull toward place and physical continuity is a deeply human instinct, not a universal one. This article was written with the help of AI for research — ideas grew out of a genuine conversation about where this technology leads. All opinions are my own.

Hit the Reverse Button on a Learning Vacuum Brain 💭

Cat Mac — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 21:17:59 +0000

There's a phase almost every developer gets stuck in. You're consuming tutorials, bookmarking articles, finishing courses, and buying books you'll read "eventually." You're learning constantly — but you're not producing anything. You're just... absorbing.

That's the learning vacuum. And if you've been there, you know how easy it is to confuse staying busy with making progress.

At some point, the shift has to happen. You stop being a sponge and start being a signal. Here's how I started making that turn.

Start a Daily or Weekly Code Journal

You don't need a blog, a brand, or an audience for this. Just a file. A note. Anything.

Write down what you built, what broke, and what you figured out. Even one sentence counts. I like to write a quick sentence and how many hours, just like if you were filling in an invoice for contract work. The act of putting it into words forces you to actually process what you learned instead of letting it blur into the background noise of your brain. Over time, those entries start to look like a roadmap — and you realize you've come further than you thought.

Code Something You Actually Want to Build

Pick something dumb. Pick something fun. A browser game, a weird UI experiment, a tool that solves exactly one tiny problem in your life. I signed up for DEV Challenges, Summer Bug Challenge and upcoming Weekend Challenge to get my ball rolling.

The best projects I've ever worked on had no real-world utility. They were just interesting to me. And that interest kept me showing up even when things got hard. A tutorial can't give you that. Only a project you actually care about can.

Find Your People

Whether it's here or a Discord server, a local meetup, a dev community on Farcaster or Lens, or just a forum thread you keep coming back to — find somewhere to show up regularly.

Lurking is fine at first. But eventually, drop a comment. Answer a question you know the answer to. Share something you built. Community is where isolated learning becomes shared knowledge, and it changes how you think about what you're working on.

Leave Feedback Like You Wish Someone Had for You

When you see someone else's project, their first blog post, their messy-but-working code — say something real. Not just "nice work." Tell them what actually stood out. Ask a genuine question. Point out something they could level up if they wanted to.

This does two things: it helps them, and it quietly sharpens your own eye for quality. You start noticing things about your own work that you'd glossed over before.

Start Writing About What You Love in Tech

You don't have to be an expert to write about something. You just have to be one step ahead of someone else who's figuring it out right now. That's your audience.

Write about the library you've been obsessing over. Explain the concept that finally clicked for you last week. Describe the bug that nearly ended you and how you worked through it. That kind of writing is genuinely useful — and it's also proof, to yourself and everyone else, that you know more than you think you do.

Give Yourself Credit for How Far You've Come

This one's easy to skip, but it matters a lot.

If you've been coding for even six months, you have knowledge that someone else desperately needs right now who also has been coding for six months. The concept that feels obvious to you today was confusing once. The problem you can solve in twenty minutes used to take you three days.

Confidence isn't about knowing everything. It's about trusting that what you do know has real value. That trust is what lets you share freely instead of always waiting until you're "ready."

Accept That You Can't Learn Everything — and That's Okay

At some point, the learning vacuum feeds itself with anxiety. There's always a new framework. Another language to pick up. Another thing you "should" know. It never ends.

Here's the thing though: you have a whole life outside the screen. And trying to learn everything is not just impossible, it's kind of a waste of that life.

Pick your lane. Go deep on the things that actually light you up. Let the rest exist without you.

Embrace Imperfection as a Feature, Not a Bug

Perfect is finished, polished, and dead. Curious is messy, ongoing, and alive.

The developers who keep growing aren't the ones who get everything right — they're the ones who stay open. They ship the rough draft. They ask the dumb question. They try the thing that probably won't work. An open mind is genuinely more useful than a perfect one.

Get a Tamagotchi (No, Really)

Hear me out.

If you don't have a pet, get a Tamagotchi. Or code one of those little digital critters that needs feeding and attention and will absolutely die if you ignore it for too long.

It sounds silly. It is a little silly. But there's something about caring for something outside of your own head — even a pixelated monster — that breaks the loop. It pulls you out of the scroll. It reminds you that presence matters, and that you can be responsible for something without optimizing it to death.

Plus, they're fun.🐱‍🐉

The Reverse Button

Switching from learning mode to sharing mode isn't about having all the answers. It's about deciding that what you know right now is already worth something to someone.

Start small. Write a sentence. Post the rough project. Leave the comment. You don't need to wait until you're an expert to start contributing — and honestly, if you wait that long, you'll be waiting forever.

Hit the reverse button. Give some of it back.🙌

Written with the help of Claude as a drafting assistant — all ideas and experiences are my own.