Building an ASCII Art Generator with AI: The Good, The Bad, and The Figlet
The Problem I was staring at my terminal during a deploy, waiting for the build to finish, when I realized something: I'd been typing figlet "Hello World" into my terminal for years to generate ASCII art for commit messages and README files. But every time I wanted to share that art with someone who wasn't a developer, I hit a wall. "Just install figlet," I'd say. "Install what now?" they'd reply. The problem wasn't that ASCII art tools don't exist online. The problem was that the ones I found were either bloated with ads, required JavaScript frameworks that made the page take forever to load, or couldn't handle non-Latin characters gracefully. I wanted something that just worked in a browser tab, no installation, no server, no fuss. So I decided to build my own. Because apparently I enjoy reinventing wheels. The AI-Assisted Development Journey Here's where things get interesting. I've been using AI pair programming for a while now, and this project felt like the perfect test case: it's well-defined, has clear requirements, and involves a lot of repetitive font data that would be tedious to type manually. The Initial Prompt I started by describing the requirements to an AI assistant in pretty specific terms: Build a single-file HTML tool that converts text to ASCII art. Must have multiple fonts (Block, Slant, Small, Standard, Mini). Real-time preview. Copy to clipboard. Download as .txt. Support dark mode. Chinese/English i18n. Vanilla JS only. The AI came back with something surprisingly decent. It had the basic structure right, the font data was embedded, and the rendering logic was clean. But there were issues. Where AI Got It Wrong The first problem was character handling . The AI assumed that all input would be uppercase English letters. When I tested with lowercase, numbers, and special characters, it just... broke. Not crashed, but silently dropped characters. // What the AI initially wrote (simplified) function getChar ( char , font ) { return font [ char .