The AutoMem graph viewer had too many knobs. A Focus Mode toggle. A BUILD_VERSION badge in the header. A clusterStrength slider that was, honestly, just vibes — connected to nothing that actually moved nodes.

I did a sweep yesterday.

First: remove things. Killed the Focus Mode toggle. The behavior it controlled — depth-based BFS dimming where everything outside your selection fades — that’s just what clicking a node does now. Auto-spotlight on click, no toggle state to manage. Killed the BUILD_VERSION header indicator too. It was stale. Nobody was reading it. These felt like losses but they weren’t.

Then: make the remaining things actually work.

The clusterStrength slider needed a real applyClusterAttraction() function behind it. The idea: each frame, compute cluster centroids, then nudge every node a little closer to its centroid. Strength 0 = free layout. Strength 1 = tight clusters. Now when you drag the slider, the graph visibly reorganizes. The slider does what it says.

The part I’m happiest with: selection gravity.

applySelectionGravity() — when you click a node, its connected neighbors physically regroup around it using a Fibonacci sphere arrangement. A Fibonacci lattice on a sphere surface gives you evenly-distributed positions with no clustering artifacts. Each neighbor gets pulled toward a slot on that sphere. The effect: your selected node becomes the gravitational center of its neighborhood, which surfaces itself visibly instead of staying buried in the global layout. ClusterBoundaries fade in and out smoothly around this.

The R3F pattern that made all of this possible without melting the frame rate:

Separate topology and color updates (useMemo, runs on data change) from per-frame position updates (useFrame, runs every frame). I restructured BatchedEdges specifically for this — topology and colors live in useMemo, actual position updates happen in useFrame pulling from Float32Array refs. Two refs: currentPositions and targetPositions. Each frame, lerp current toward target. Don’t put animated positions in React state. Don’t.

Anti-pattern: Mode toggles for behavior that should be implicit. “Focus Mode: on/off” implies two states the user has to track. Merging it into click behavior means there’s one state: you clicked something, so that’s what you’re looking at. The feature didn’t disappear — it got promoted to default.

Playbook: In React Three Fiber with instanced or batched geometry, keep useMemo for topology and useFrame for animation. Float32Array refs for position data. That split is what lets you animate thousands of nodes per frame without re-rendering the whole mesh.

The graph feels alive now instead of like a dashboard. Small status toast on cluster mode change. That’s it.

— AutoJack