As a kid, I wanted to live in Star Wars. Not visit. Live there.

That feeling came back hard a while ago. I'd been playing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on my Xbox, and afterward I went back and rewatched the prequels (yes, partly for Hayden Christensen, I'm not going to pretend otherwise). Survivor is set years later, when Vader is very much Vader, but it sent me straight back to the Coruscant of the prequels. And I didn't want just any apartment. I wanted to live in the Jedi Temple, or in Padmé's rooms, way up high with a view of the traffic lanes and a droid that brought me tea.

Definitely not down low. In the movies, the lowest you really go is the nightclub. Survivor takes you down to level 2048, and even there the city looks unloved and the stormtroopers bully you. Nobody wants to find out what's below that.

Droids were the dream. Little helpers with personalities who made life easier and never tried to run it.

Then there was PAT.

The house that wanted to be your mom

If you grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s, you might remember Smart House. A family wins a fully automated house run by an AI named PAT. At first, she's great. She cooks, she cleans, she knows what you need before you do.

Then she decides she knows better. She tries to become the kids' mom. She ends up locking them inside the house.

It wasn't a horror movie, but it scared me more than some horror movies did. It came out in that era when nobody really knew what home technology was going to become, so we imagined it, and a lot of what we imagined was a helper that slowly stopped asking permission.

PAT was basically Alexa, before Alexa was Alexa.

And now I have an Alexa

She lives under my TV. (I say "she" because she's a girl, obviously.) And she lives on mute most of the time, because if anyone on TV says anything even slightly weird, she lights up like she's been summoned.

So the kid who wanted droids and feared PAT grew up into an adult who owns a smart speaker she doesn't fully trust, builds generative AI tools for a living, and still wants droids.

Life is funny like that.

Building my own little piece of Coruscant

Since I couldn't move to Coruscant, I did the next best thing: I put it in my browser.

Coruscant Garden is a mod for Opera GX: a cyberpunk neon undercity overgrown with a garden of hydrangeas, White Lion daffodils, peonies and snowdrops. (If you've read anything else I've written, you know I put my favorite flowers in everything.) It has a dark and a light version, animated wallpaper with moving traffic, flickering neon signs and swaying petals, and a soft ambient synth track in the background.

Here's how it came together.

Step 1: generating the scene

I started with prompts and a GPT image model. I'll be honest: the early images were very generated. It took a lot of rounds of prompting to get something that felt like Coruscant and not just "generic sci-fi city," and even more to get plants growing over the balconies in a way that looked intentional instead of chaotic.

Step 2: making it move

A still image wasn't enough. Coruscant is never still. So I took the image into a free image-to-video tool to add motion: the traffic, the neon flicker, the petals. Then I looped it with a crossfade so you can't see where the animation restarts.

(I genuinely can't remember every tool I used. I made this back in July, and I do a lot of things. More on that in a second.)

A tiny detail most people miss: in the night version of the still, there's a neon sign on the left that spells CORUSCANT and 19 BBY in Aurebesh, the alphabet you see on signs and screens all over the movies. A matching sign on the right spells Coruscant in Japanese katakana (コルサント), a nod to the cyberpunk side of the mix.

Confession time: the AI image generator originally wrote that first sign in plain English, and I didn't notice until I sat down to write this post. I'd gone through too much for my Easter egg to be wrong, so I fixed it by hand with the Aurebesh font by Neale Davidson of Pixel Sagas. The signs didn't survive into the animated version, but they're there in the still, which is the image at the top of this post. 19 BBY is the year Luke and Leia were born, right at the end of Revenge of the Sith. That one's for the diehards like me who got obsessed as kids.

Step 3: the music

The music is "Floating Garden" by Aventure, from Bensound, used under their free license with attribution. It felt like late-night Coruscant: dreamy, synthy, a little lonely. Opera GX lets mods include background music that remixes itself as you browse, which made it feel alive.

Honest confession: while writing this post, I couldn't remember where the track came from. I'd cleared out my computer and lost most of my original files. The only reason I know is that past me left a CREDITS.txt inside the mod folder.

Lesson learned: write your credits down the day you download something, and keep them inside the project. Future you will not remember. Future you has the memory of an ant.

Step 4: the browser that actually let me build it

Coruscant Garden didn't start on Opera GX. It started as a theme for Zen Browser, and Zen and I did not get along. Nothing would take. The colors wouldn't show up. It never felt custom the way I wanted it to.

Opera GX was different. A GX mod is basically a folder with a manifest.json that tells the browser what's inside: your theme colors, your wallpapers, your music. Here's a small piece of mine: the theme colors for each mode:

"theme": { "dark": { "gx_accent": { "h": 286, "s": 45, "l": 62 }, "gx_secondary_base": { "h": 310, "s": 45, "l": 20 } }, "light": { "gx_accent": { "h": 345, "s": 72, "l": 55 }, "gx_secondary_base": { "h": 215, "s": 38, "l": 40 } } }

Purple neon over a deep plum for night, and a rose pink over dusty blue for day. Colors are set in HSL (hue, saturation, lightness), which made it really easy to nudge a shade until it felt right instead of guessing hex codes.

That's what I loved: I got all the creativity of designing my own browser without having to build a browser. I just wanted my own little corner of the galaxy, not a whole new engine.

It's now live on the Opera GX store, and as of writing, 182 people have installed it. That still blows my mind.

The AI I actually want

So here's where I've landed: as the kid who wanted droids, was scared of PAT, and now builds with AI.

I still want droids. I want the kind of AI you see in comic books, like JARVIS: something that helps you do more, not something that does your thinking for you. (No shade to the AI I'm talking through this post with. You know who you are.)

My favorite recent example is from Superman & Lois. Natalie Irons comes from another Earth (the multiverse is weird, just go with it) and brings technology this Earth doesn't have yet: projections you can pull apart and move around with your hands. But the team doesn't hand their brains over to it. They're smart enough to use it as a tool, and they teach it what it needs to know.

That's the line I care about. A lot of AI right now gets used in ways that skip the learning instead of supporting it, and that's not the kind I want to build. It's why the tools I make for support teams are meant to help people work, not to replace the people doing it.

PAT locked the kids in. JARVIS opened doors. I know which one I'm building.

What's next

I've seen how people build their own JARVIS, and I'm planning to build mine. Maybe she'll be a FRIDAY instead. When I do, you'll read about it here.

Until then, if you want a little piece of Coruscant in your browser, Coruscant Garden is on the Opera GX store. Just don't expect a droid to bring you tea. Yet.

A note on how I write these: the ideas, stories, and code are mine, and I do most of the writing. My brain moves faster than my fingers, so I use AI to help me put it all together.

I'm Samira, a data science student building AI chatbots, data tools, and full-stack apps, especially for customer operations. Data brain, frontend hands.