[adam_patarino]

Tell me someone has turned this into a library we can use

[alexharri]

Author here. There isn't a library around this yet, but the source code for the blog is open source (MIT licensed): https://github.com/alexharri/website

The code for this post is all in PR #15 if you want to take a look.

[nathell]

Well there's aalib and libcaca, but I'm not sure about their fidelity compared to this.

[guerby]

Don't know what algorithm are used by the famous libcaca:

https://github.com/cacalabs/libcaca

[minimaxir]

I was investigating a fun webcam-to-ASCII project so now I am tempted to take an approach at porting the logic from the blog post into something reusable.

[minimaxir]

Update: I tested a port of the OP's methodology using Claude Code/Claude Opus 4.5 with some specific performance optimizations, and per the benchmarks, converting a 1024x1024 image to ASCII takes 16 microseconds. I suspect that will decrease after some more polish/iteration but that's enough for potentially real-time generation even on mobile hardware.