My mom does bead art. The kind where you sit with a tray of tiny plastic beads and, over hours — sometimes days — assemble them into an intricate portrait or devotional motif. It's meditative, precise, and deeply personal. The bottleneck has always been the pattern. You can't look at a photograph and start placing beads. You need to know exactly which bead goes where, in what color, on a grid that maps to the physical constraints of the project: how wide it is, how many colors of beads you've bought, how coarse or fine the detail needs to be. She was doing this by eye, or with rough printouts. I kept thinking: there has to be a better way. So I opened Gemini and started a conversation. What came out of that is BeadGen — a fully local, zero-dependency browser tool that converts any photo into a ready-to-stitch bead pattern. No backend. No npm. No install. You open an HTML file and use it. But this post isn't really about the tool.…