Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry --skill image-to-asciigit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundryWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry/image-to-ascii)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry/image-to-ascii"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry/image-to-ascii/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry/image-to-ascii"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry/image-to-ascii.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00207 | $0.01971 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00103 | $0.00986 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00041 | $0.00394 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00197 |
Grade A, and why
image-to-ascii scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 155 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
image-to-ascii
Convert an image file to ASCII art from the command line — to stdout, a .txt file,
or a rendered .png/.svg — using shape-aware glyph matching. The converter is
scripts/image_to_ascii.py: Pillow-only, pure-Python, Python 3.9+.
Mental model
- A naive ASCII converter picks one glyph per cell off a brightness ramp
(
" .:-=+*#%@"). That is nearest-neighbour downsampling — every cell is treated as a pixel, so edges come out jagged and curves look like staircases. - This converter instead reduces both each glyph and each image cell to a
6D shape vector (six staggered sampling circles in a 2×3 grid) and matches the
glyph whose shape is closest. A diagonal edge picks
/or\, a top bar picks"/^, a base picks_. Edges stay crisp because shape, not just average brightness, drives the choice. - Glyph vectors are computed by actually rasterizing the bundled font, so the
match reflects the real ink — and
png/svgoutput draws with that same font, so the rendered image is self-consistent with the text. - Polarity: by default dark pixels → dense glyphs (
@,#), which looks right as text on a light background (a README, a.txt). For light-on-dark output (terminal style, e.g. white-on-black), add--invert.
For the full technique — circle geometry, the contrast-enhancement formulas, the
luminance coefficients, caching — read references/technique.md.
Setup
The converter needs Pillow (nothing else):
python3 -m pip install Pillow
The monospace font ships in assets/DejaVuSansMono.ttf (with its license), so output
is deterministic on any machine. No system fonts are required.
Usage
# Print 80-column ASCII to stdout
python3 scripts/image_to_ascii.py photo.jpg --cols 80
# Save a .txt for a README
python3 scripts/image_to_ascii.py logo.png --cols 100 --out logo.txt
# Render a PNG, white text on black (terminal look — note --invert for correct tones)
python3 scripts/image_to_ascii.py photo.jpg --cols 120 --invert \
--format png --fg white --bg black --out photo.png
# Sharper edges on a high-contrast logo / 3D render
python3 scripts/image_to_ascii.py render.png --cols 100 --contrast 4 --directional
What ships with it
11 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 11d ago First seen · 155 lines · 207 tokens per session scan A f7daea848f62
image-to-ascii is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinsonconsulting/claude-skill-foundry (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 207 tokens to every session and 1,971 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
Other skills, from other repositories
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Use when users request: p5.js sketches, creative coding, generative art, interactive visualizations, canvas animations, browser-based visual art, data viz, shader effects, or any p5.js project.
audiocraft-audio-generation
AudioCraft: MusicGen text-to-music, AudioGen text-to-sound.
ascii-video
ASCII video: convert video/audio to colored ASCII MP4/GIF.
creative-ideation
Generate ideas via named methods from creative practice.
baoyu-article-illustrator
Article illustrations: type × style × palette consistency.
meme-generation
Create meme PNGs from templates with Pillow text overlay.