This reminds me of something (far, far simpler) that I did long ago. I wrote a small webapp that continually queried various servers and would keep the connection open to push new <div> blocks as the server-side async queries completed. I ran into output-buffering issues (probably from the reverse-proxy server, but I can’t be certain at this point) and ended up appending a 1K block of commented-out non-printing unicode characters to ensure it would get flushed to the browser. I called it the plunger. Probably not the best solution 😅
I guess both? You do hand-of-god design your own life form iteratively over generations, but other microorganisms evolve randomly and branch and die off all over the place (and your own species will branch off into other ones that randomly evolve too - you might be making a meal out of your cousins in a couple generations).