Summary & Key Takeaways ​

• Simon Willison previously built a Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Rust code. • He discovered AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii, a more fully-featured Go library. • Claude Fable 5 was used to compile the Go library to WebAssembly. • This allowed for a direct comparison of the two Mermaid to ASCII tools. • The Go-based tool compiled to WASM includes support for colors.

Our Commentary ​

I appreciate seeing these smaller, practical applications of WebAssembly and AI. It's not always about the headline-grabbing, browser-in-browser stuff. Sometimes it's just about making a useful little tool. The fact that Claude Fable 5 was used to compile the Go library to WASM is a neat detail; it shows how AI is becoming a quiet assistant in everyday dev tasks. We're seeing more and more of this.