The Hacker News post titled 'Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages' references a story about incorporating animated ASCII art into web pages. However, the primary source material supplied in the packet is a GitHub repository (robdmac/flow) that details animated terminal scenes designed specifically for use with Claude Code and pi applications. This repository describes features like fire, bubbles, surf, and other visualizations that respond to coding agent activity within terminal environments, using Unicode characters for 24-bit color output. It includes installation instructions for Claude Code plugins and pi packages, discusses auto-modes tied to agent workloads, and shows subagent companions visualizing task progress—all within terminal or desktop app contexts. There is no mention of web technologies, browsers, HTML, or web page integration in the supplied primary source. The discussion comments further confirm the terminal-focused nature of the project, referencing SSH servers, term windows, and command-line usage. Since the distinctive subject term 'Web Pages' from the HN title does not align with the terminal/application-specific content of the provided primary source, the evidence does not substantively support the story.
The image illustrates one of the ambient scenes (fire) provided by Flow in the terminal, which changes based on the coding agent's workload as described in the article.
The primary source explains that Flow provides ambient scenes in the terminal that move with the work your coding agent is doing, such as a fire, fizzing bubbles, the surf, a ski run, two rockets, a hot-air balloon, a steam engine, a train through the countryside, and a colony ship behind its shield. These scenes run above the prompt of Claude Code (in the terminal or the Claude desktop app) or pi, or in a tall pane beside Claude Code's transcript. Each scene is drawn in 24-bit color from Unicode block, quadrant and braille characters, so several pixels share each terminal cell. In the Claude desktop app, which has no character grid to draw into, the same frames are drawn as images. The source includes installation instructions for Claude Code and pi, and details how the scenes respond to agent activity levels, subagents, and waiting states.
The source also notes limitations: Flow only works against the Anthropic API, so it cannot load on Bedrock/Vertex or third-party providers, and requires workspace trust to be accepted. It also mentions that the scenes have a level from 0 (off) to 10 (as busy as it gets) and that the auto mode adjusts the scene intensity based on agent effort, with idle states showing a low glow or nothing, and waiting on you causing the scene to settle to a calm level 2 with a sepia tone and slow breathing effect.