⚠️ THIS POST IS GENERATED WITH LLMs: This post is newly generated a few times a week based on trending articles from hacker news. It takes the tone of my writing style, takes the topic from Hacker News - throws in some LLM magic and generates this post. Please be aware I don’t read what gets generated here - it means I may agree, I may not - its a crap shoot - its not meant to be an opinion piece but merely an experiment with the services from OpenRouter - last updated Thursday 28 August 2025
Why I Fell in Love with ASCII Art All Over Again
Somewhere between debugging Python scripts and tweaking my smoked brisket rub this weekend, I stumbled into a delightful rabbit hole: ASCII art. Not the kind you half-heartedly throw into a README file with === and >>> symbols, but proper diagrams, flowcharts, even mind maps—all crafted from plain text.
Turns out, there’s something deeply satisfying about building visuals without ever leaving the keyboard. Maybe it’s the hacker ethos of it—no fancy design tools, just raw characters shaping ideas. Or maybe I’m just nostalgic for the days when my brother and I would try (and fail) to draw stick figures in MS-DOS. Either way, I’m hooked.
The Beauty of Plain Text
There’s a reason plain text has outlived every tech trend since the ‘70s. It’s universal. Lightweight. Stubbornly portable. Need to slap a diagram into Slack, a Git commit, or a Confluence doc? No export/import drama—just copy and paste. And if you’ve ever tried explaining a data structure or workflow to a teammate, you know that a well-placed ASCII diagram cuts through confusion faster than a five-slide deck.
But let’s be real: crafting this stuff manually is tedious. Counting spaces, aligning pipes and dashes, realizing you’re one character off and having to start over… It’s like hand-coding CSS in 2002. That’s where [redacted] came in for me—a tool that lets you design ASCII art visually, then spit it out as text. Game changer.
What I’ve Been Building
- Team Retrospectives in Terminal Format – Our last sprint review included a flowchart of “Why the Deployment Failed” (Spoiler:
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻was involved). It got more laughs—and more clarity—than the Jira tickets. - Smoker Recipes as Flowcharts – Because nothing says “low and slow BBQ” like a CLI-friendly rendering of
MEAT → RUB → SMOKE (225°F) → 🍖. - My Kid’s Homework “Cheat Sheets” – His teacher may regret encouraging creativity when he submits a binary tree diagram drawn entirely with
┌─┐and│║.
The Unexpected Perks
- Keyboard-Only Workflow: Switch between code and diagrams without touching the mouse. (Yes, I’m one of those people.)
- Git-Friendly: Version-controlled art that doesn’t bloat your repo.
- Nerdy Bonding: Show a 10-year-old how to make a smiley face with
:)and suddenly you’re their favorite adult.
Why It Matters
In a world drowning in SaaS tools and过度设计的 UI, there’s still magic in simplicity. ASCII art is the duct tape of communication—humble, adaptable, and weirdly charming. And if it makes documenting code or planning projects slightly more fun? Well, that’s just a bonus.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sudoku solver to diagram—in Courier New, of course.
Tool of the day: [redacted]. Not sponsored, just obsessed. (But if they want to pay me in license keys, I accept BTC and BBQ rub recipes.)
