[tonnydourado]

I won't deny OP learned something in this process, but I can't help but wonder: if they spent the same time and effort just porting the code themselves, how much more would they have learned?

Specially considering that the output would be essentially the same: a bunch of code that doesn't work.

[rfw300]

That may be true, but it does seem like OP's intent was to learn something about how LLM agents perform on complex engineering tasks, rather than learning about ASCII creation logic. A different but perhaps still worthy experiment.

[embedding-shape]

I guess it depends on well people want to know things like "Perl (and C) library to web" skills. Personally, there are languages I don't want to learn, but for one reason or another, I have to change some details in a project that happen to use that language. Sure, I could sit down and learn enough of the language so I can do the thing, but if I don't like or want to use that language, the knowledge will eventually atrophy anyways, so why bother?

[20after4]

I think the specific language in question - perl - is really the source of OP's frustration. Perl is kind of like Regular Expressions - much easier to write than it is to read. I would expect LLMs to struggle with understanding perl. It's one of the best languages for producing obfuscated code by hand. There are many subtleties and context-dependence in perl, and they aren't immediately apparent from the raw syntax.

Edit: I totally agree with your point about not wanting to learn a language. That's definitely a situation where LLMs can excel and almost an ideal use case for them. I just think that Perl, in particular, will be hard to work with, given the current capabilities of LLM coding tools and models. It might be necessary to actually learn the language, and even that might not be enough.