@github's got a fun new sign-up flow that includes this little world-building octocat I made earlier this year. Almost worth making a new account just to see her live :)

Pro tip: If you’re using GitHub Copilot CLI and want to see the welcome banner on every load, change the “banner” property at ~/.copilot/config.json to “always” 🤓

And if you've made it this far, please go try Ascii Motion and tell me what you think! Lots of bugs to chase and features to add, but it would make my day if someone opened an issue in the repo of my very first app to complain about how they hate it ❤️:

This is such an exciting time to be a technically-minded designer! Code was always a barrier for me getting my work into digital spaces, but now I can prototype things like one of those fancy "creative technologists" I always considered magicians!

And with this tool that I just willed into existence in under a week of post-kids-bedtime copilot sessions, I was immediately able to make the teaser animation for the CLI that GitHub posted a few days before the launch to help build some hype.

But, I couldn't stop there! Now that I had a taste of the ASCII bug, I knew that I needed to make a better tool for making ASCII animation. So, I spent a handful of nights with Copilot spinning up an MVP of my very first app: https://t.co/d7DKauLtnR (desktop only for now)

I handed that file off to the aggressively helpful Andy Feller on the CLI eng team, and he was able to shoehorn that in to the product with some expert refactoring making sure that the colors worked with the CLI's color theme management across color modes. Light mode FTW!

Because I was able to show copilot the tech stack for building the Copilot CLI (React for the CLI with INK, using Typescript), and tell it to create an export feature for my app that would save a self contained .tsx file with the character and color data to slip into the CLI.

In the past, I would have just made some After Effects mock of what I wanted and handed it off to the engineers and say "good luck!" But, in the era of the Vibe-coding Brand Designer, I was able to give them close to shippable code right off the bat...

Then, with my trusty Copilot agent mode in VSCode, I vibe-coded myself a simple web tool to do what I wanted to do: ingest .txt files as frames on a js canvas, set the duration of frames and test playback, and add and preview different terminal's default ANSI colors.

The best tool I could find was https://t.co/17AaPUFYSx's ASCII Draw Studio, that let me "draw" on a canvas in one color with no animation, and export out .txt files. Not exactly what I needed, but close enough to get started.

And I learned from the engineers that it would need to be utilizing the 4-bit ANSI escape code colors to be universally supported and be accessible. These are rendered differently in every terminal, because of course! This was going to be trickier than I thought! 😬

I quickly realized that there really aren't great off the shelf tools for making this sort of thing. Lots of clunky half-baked tools for static images, or fancy shader effects for animation with no manual frame-by-frame editing.

When the CLI team asked for a ASCII banner, I knew I wanted it to be animated and utilize some color, but had zero experience with ASCII art. I thought, "it's just text, how hard can it be???"

The public preview of Github Copilot CLI launched today, and if you install it, you'll be welcomed by little ASCII art welcome banner that I animated. Creating it ended up being great example of how vibe-coding has entered my toolbelt. Nerdy deets in 🧵...

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Today we’re releasing GitHub Spark — a new tool in Copilot that turns your ideas into full-stack apps, entirely in natural language.

Learned two things today, one... there is a hidden gem inside the GitHub app on iOS. Two... I really suck at Flappy Bird.

S/O to @deanblacc for wrangling the code on this. The GitHub Copilot design engineering team is killing it with this kind of attention to delightful details. I’m super excited to see more polish like this as the product matures. Thanks for following along!

This Director/Actor setup allows for a separation of concerns, making it easy to extend and add new animations, while also allowing us to maintain full control of timings and transitions, creating an interactive Copilot experience - fun to watch and easy to maintain!

Once the Director knows which animation should be playing, it delegates the execution of this animation to the Actor. The Actor is a smaller and much more simple state machine that breaks each animation into 4 stages: 1) Idle, 2) Starting, 3) Running, 4) Ending