I will remove the novel wording just for the hacker news geniuses. I have been programming for 26 years and have never encountered this pattern, nor could I find it in any libraries, which is why I decided to wrap it up in a library.

If a simple bitset like this exists in a library somewhere I would love to see where! Most implementations I've seen over-complicate it for simple use cases like this.

You may enjoy this page then. https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

Bunches of bit twiddling things people like to do in different places for either speed/space.

I have had the experience of explaining to coworkers how bitwise operators even work more than once. I think sometimes people overestimate the average programmers knowledge when it comes to bit operations. modern programming is so detached from having to use that for day to day work.

I am aware of the bithacks page, but I just found encoding the bit coordinate in the ID itself so clever.

Can I ask, how would you do it otherwise? Is there any other way? Or is the supposed novelty here that the two values are packed into the same byte instead of having some zero bits between?

Yeah, you weren't going to win this. Most developers I've met would have approached this from one of the two extremes:

"Lol, this is the obvious implementation."

or

"Lol, just use a boolean."

That is to say, those that might be interested would already know. I'd expect very little in between.

Fwiw, I do think noticing the id readability is notable from a reverse engineering standpoint.

C++ std::vector<bool>