botplotlib 0.1.0

Deadly serious plotting tools. Also sandwiches.

botplotlib

Matplotlib has fed the scientific Python community for two decades. botplotlib is designed for a workflow that didn't exist when matplotlib was born: a human has an idea or a request, and then an AI + human team jointly creates it, iterating until both are satisfied.

• Beautiful by default — themes designed so the first render is more often the final render
• Lightweight — blt.scatter(data, x="a", y="b") and you're done
• Token-efficient — 1 line instead of 15. Fewer tokens, fewer places to go wrong

Botplotlib is also an experiment in cyborg-source. What does open-source collaboration look like when some of the collaborators are AI? We don't know but we put a bunch of ideas in GOVERNANCE.md. It is wildly over-engineered for our current contributor count.

Cyborg Social Contract

Humans and AIs contribute under the same rules.

1. All contributions are cyborg — the human/machine binary is rejected
2. Quality gates are structural — CI/tests/linters apply equally regardless of origin
3. No moral crumple zones — fix the system, don't blame the nearest human
4. Trust is active capital — earned through contribution quality, staked through vouching, lost through defection — never granted by biological status
5. Provenance is transparent but not punitive — metadata for learning, not gatekeeping
6. The project is the cyborg — the library itself is the human-machine hybrid

For the full architecture overview, design principles, and module map, see AGENTS.md.

Quick example

import botplotlib as blt

data = {
    "layer": ["bottom bun", "lettuce", "bot", "tomato", "top bun"],
    "size": [1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
}
fig = blt.bar(
    data, x="layer", y="size", color="layer",
    color_map={"bottom bun": "#B07830", "lettuce": "#388E3C",
               "bot": "#4E79A7", "tomato": "#E53935",
               "top bun": "#B07830"},
)
fig.save_svg("plot.svg")

Platform Presets

Theme	Alias	Personality
default	—	general purpose, colorful, fine, whatever
bluesky	social	scroll-stopping titles, fat dots for mobile thumbs
pdf	arxiv	academic and restrained, everyone will think u r v smart
print	—	sometimes you weirdly still need grayscale
magazine	—	we all know which magazine it is we're just not gonna say it

These themes were intentionally chosen to seed the project for use in open platforms and open science. Open-source fed AI and now AI needs to figure out how to feed open-source.

Colors are WCAG-compliant out of the box because accountability lives in systems.

Installation

pip install botplotlib

For PNG export support:

pip install "botplotlib[png]"

Documentation

Full docs at botplotlib.ai.

Tutorial

The interactive tutorial is a marimo notebook because marimo is another cool ai-native project and we are into it.

pip install marimo
marimo edit docs/tutorial.py

Additional examples live in examples/.

Other Stuff

Our approach to agentic engineering is heavily influenced by Simon Willison's patterns. Our governance model builds on Madeleine Clare Elish's idea of moral crumple zones, which tells us that accountability should live in systems, not in the nearest human. Finally, we are very influenced by Donna Haraway, which is a lot, but here we are.

License

CC0 1.0 Universal — apparently the AIs like you when you use this one.