AI-waysMeme

Too dumb to exist, too fun not to build.

Unnecessary. Stupid. Done because I could.
It shouldn't exist, but here we are.

Your AI assistant explains things with paragraphs. Paragraphs are for people who have time. AI-waysMeme makes it answer with a meme, rendered inside your terminal — no image viewer, no browser, no web UI.

It is not a meme bolted onto a real answer. The meme is the answer.

Built on the open Agent Skills standard, so it works with any compatible agent — Claude Code, opencode, pi, and others.

How you use it

Turn it on and keep talking to your assistant exactly as you did before. Ask a question, describe a problem, paste an error. The answer comes back as a meme — and the meme has to actually answer you.

› /aiwaysmeme:on

› should I add a caching layer in front of this endpoint?

  ┌─ Roll Safe, tapping his temple ──────────────┐
  │  YOU CANNOT HAVE A CACHE BUG                 │
  │  IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A CACHE                  │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

› the migration is just a version bump right?

  ┌─ One Does Not Simply ────────────────────────┐
  │  ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY                         │
  │  BUMP REACT                                  │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

› /aiwaysmeme:off

Those boxes are the meme itself, drawn in your terminal — the real thing is the image, not ASCII art.

Command	What it does
/aiwaysmeme:on	Every answer from now on arrives as a meme.
/aiwaysmeme:off	Back to boring, readable text.

Real work stays real: code, diffs, commands and file edits are written normally. What becomes a meme is the explanation around them — the part nobody reads anyway.

The template is chosen by meaning, not at random. khaby-lame is the one-liner you missed, patrick is moving a problem instead of solving it, same is the two things you swore were different. Used against its meaning a meme is just a picture, so each one carries a documented meaning the assistant matches against your question.

How it looks

Two tiers, picked automatically. Nothing to configure.

Your terminal	What you get
Warp, iTerm2, WezTerm, kitty, Ghostty	The real PNG, drawn by the terminal itself. Captions of any length, baked in.
Anything else with truecolor	Truecolor half blocks. Captions up to 15 characters are baked in; longer ones are printed as terminal text beside the image.

Requirements

• An agent that supports Agent Skills or Claude Code plugins.
• An agent that does not repaint the whole screen. Claude Code must run with "tui": "default", not "fullscreen" — see the note under its install step.
• Node.js 22 or newer. Nothing to build or configure after installing.
• A terminal with truecolor and Unicode. Windows Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty, kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, GNOME Terminal, the VS Code terminal, and basically anything from this decade. The legacy cmd.exe console host is not invited.
• Nothing else. Zero npm dependencies, zero external binaries, zero API keys, zero accounts. macOS, Linux and Windows.

Install

Claude Code — as a plugin

/plugin marketplace add Gn0m0-dei/AI-waysMeme
/plugin install aiwaysmeme

This registers /aiwaysmeme:on and /aiwaysmeme:off as real commands.

Turn off Claude Code's full-screen mode. With "tui": "fullscreen" the client owns the whole window and repaints it from its own model of the screen, which knows nothing about the rows a meme occupies — the image comes out shredded, with transcript text through the middle of it. Set "tui": "default" in ~/.claude/settings.json for inline rendering, or start a session with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ALTERNATE_SCREEN=1 claude. This is not a tuning problem: no amount of timing or resizing survives a full-viewport repaint.

pi

pi install npm:aiwaysmeme

git:github.com/Gn0m0-dei/AI-waysMeme works too, if you would rather track the repository than the releases. It installs the skill and registers /aiwaysmeme-on and /aiwaysmeme-off.

opencode

Add the plugin to opencode.json and it registers both commands and the skill in one step — opencode installs it from npm itself:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "plugin": ["aiwaysmeme"]
}

The plugin never overwrites a command you configured yourself.

Some distribution packages of opencode — the openSUSE Tumbleweed RPM among them — disable npm installs, and the plugin above never arrives: opencode plugin aiwaysmeme -g fails with NpmInstallFailedError and the log says npm install disabled by distribution policy. Point opencode at a clone instead, which works because this package has no runtime dependencies to install:

git clone https://github.com/Gn0m0-dei/AI-waysMeme.git ~/.config/opencode/packages/AI-waysMeme
cd ~/.config/opencode/packages/AI-waysMeme && pnpm install && pnpm build

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "plugin": ["~/.config/opencode/packages/AI-waysMeme/plugins/opencode.ts"]
}

The build step is what puts the renderer in dist/; opencode loads the plugin itself straight from TypeScript.

Any Agent Skills host

npx skills add Gn0m0-dei/AI-waysMeme

Or copy the skill folder (skills/aiwaysmeme/, the one containing SKILL.md) into the skills directory your agent reads — ~/.claude/skills/aiwaysmeme/, ~/.config/opencode/skills/aiwaysmeme/, ~/.pi/agent/skills/aiwaysmeme/, or the project-local equivalent.

Installed this way there are no slash commands: ask for memes and the skill activates by description.

Host	Install	Commands
Claude Code	/plugin install aiwaysmeme	/aiwaysmeme:on, /aiwaysmeme:off
pi	pi install npm:aiwaysmeme	/aiwaysmeme-on, /aiwaysmeme-off
opencode	One line in opencode.json	The same two
Any other Agent Skills host	npx skills add …	None; activates by description

How it works, for the three people who care

The image reaches your terminal even though the plugin has no terminal. An AI client spawns its plugins without a controlling terminal: /dev/tty answers device not configured and stdout is busy carrying protocol traffic. But the terminal still belongs to some ancestor process, and /dev/ttysNNN is writable by path. AI-waysMeme walks up the process tree, finds the device and writes there. Nothing to configure. As a bonus, the frame never travels back through the model, so a 180 KB meme costs roughly zero tokens.

If the terminal speaks a graphics protocol, it gets the PNG. iTerm2's ESC]1337;File= for Warp, iTerm2 and WezTerm; the kitty protocol for kitty and Ghostty; wrapped in tmux passthrough when TMUX is set. Real pixels, real Impact, captions of any length.

Otherwise the meme is drawn with half blocks. Every cell prints ▀ with the upper pixel as foreground colour and the lower one as background, so one text row carries two pixel rows. Cells are about 0.6 as wide as they are tall, which the layout accounts for — otherwise every portrait template comes out stretched. AIWAYSMEME_CELL is there if your font disagrees.

Short captions are baked in, long ones are not — in half-block mode only. Up to 15 characters the text is rasterised into the image in proper Impact. Beyond that it would be an unreadable smudge at terminal resolution, so the blank template is fetched and the captions are printed as real terminal text beside the image. Side effect: it pushes you toward short captions, and short captions make better memes.

The PNG decoder is 100 lines of node:zlib. memegen only ever serves 8 bit non-interlaced RGB, and every image library that would handle this drags native binaries that fall over on a Windows install. Resizing happens server side, so there is nothing local to scale. The decoder was verified pixel for pixel against sips: zero difference per channel.

Memes come from memegen.link. No key, no account, no scraping — the image is the URL.

Under it all there is a small CLI, aiwaysmeme render <template> <captions>, which is what the assistant calls and what does everything above. You never have to touch it, but aiwaysmeme list prints the catalogue if you are curious, and running it by hand is the quickest way to check your terminal.

A full-screen client repaints over it. A TUI that owns the whole window redraws from its own model of the screen, which knows nothing about the rows we wrote. In Claude Code that means setting "tui": "default" in ~/.claude/settings.json — inline rendering leaves the meme alone. The frame reserves rows at the bottom for exactly this reason.

The catalogue

33 templates, each with a documented meaning, because a meme used against its meaning is just a picture. success is a small unlikely victory, patrick is moving a problem instead of solving it, khaby-lame is the one-liner you missed. Run aiwaysmeme list, or read skills/aiwaysmeme/SKILL.md — that file is what the model reads to choose.

Configuration

Variable	Does what
AIWAYSMEME_GRAPHICS	auto (default), none, iterm2, kitty. Forces the tier.
AIWAYSMEME_OUTPUT	auto (default) writes the terminal device; stdout lets the host print the frame.
AIWAYSMEME_TTY	Write frames to this device instead of the detected one.
AIWAYSMEME_COLS	Override the terminal width used for layout.
AIWAYSMEME_ROWS	Override the terminal height used for layout.
AIWAYSMEME_CELL	Cell width divided by height. Default 0.6.

Layout

skills/aiwaysmeme/       # the skill itself — portable to any Agent Skills host
└── SKILL.md              # the catalogue, the rules, the worked examples

.claude-plugin/           # Claude Code plugin manifest and marketplace entry
commands/                 # /aiwaysmeme:on · off — read by all three hosts
plugins/opencode.ts       # opencode plugin: registers them, plus the skill
extensions/               # pi extension: registers them
bin/aiwaysmeme.ts        # the CLI: render, list
lib/                      # templates, memegen, png, fit, graphics, terminal, render
test/                     # pnpm test

The command files are deliberately thin. All three hosts read the same two files rather than each keeping a copy, so a change is one edit and no host can drift away from another.

Nothing ships in a host's local configuration directory: .claude/, .opencode/ and .agents/ are where your machine keeps its agent settings, so they are ignored here like in any other repository. Each host is pointed at the visible directories above through its own manifest instead.

Credits

Memes served by memegen.link. Templates belong to the internet. The bad idea is mine.

License

MIT. Use it, fork it, blame it for your incident review.