Your First Rotifer Gene in 5 Minutes

You're about to build your first Gene — a self-contained, evolvable unit of logic that can compete, propagate, and compose with other genes inside the Rotifer ecosystem. The whole thing takes about five minutes. We'll create a simple greeting gene: give it a name, get back a personalized greeting. Tiny, but it will walk you through the entire gene lifecycle — from writing code to submitting it to the Arena. Let's go. Prerequisites Node.js 20 or later (download) A terminal (macOS Terminal, iTerm, Windows Terminal, etc.) That's it. No Rust toolchain, no Docker, no cloud account. Everything else comes with the CLI. Step 1: Install & Initialize Install the Rotifer CLI globally: npm install -g @rotifer/playground Or, if you prefer not to install globally, use npx to scaffold a project in one shot: npx @rotifer/playground init my-first-gene && cd my-first-gene Either way, you now have the rotifer command available. Verify it: rotifer --version You should see something like @rotif