Hey Tracefuh, thanks for submitting!
This reminds me strongly of Conway's Game of Life - as you mentioned it was one of your inspirations, I'm not surprised! How did you stumble on.. Brainfuck.. lol, I've never heard of it but I guess that's the point.
I hit a snag pretty early in my playtesting. Your instructions say you can type to edit the ant's instincts. However, I couldn't figure out how to type to edit anything? There's the TRAINING section below, mine looked like ",>,>,[->+<]<<[>>>[-]<<[->>+<<]<[-]]>>>." - I wondered if that's what you meant was editable? Although I can't type to change anything here. The instructions do say "TYPE any Brainfuck in the editor below the board" so I'm thinking that was the goal! Maybe the input is frozen or I'm not understanding how to write Brainfuck code lol.
So far my experience has been clicking a cell and watching black squares fill the page. Like with Conway's Game of Life, I didn't enjoy it until I started to appreciate what was happening under the hood. Then I got really interested in it and, not surprisingly, there's an enormous community of fans for that game. I'm curious to know if this could become something like that!