Show HN: Make custom ASCII art t-shirts from your terminal

[kaniksu]

I wanted to build my first CLI app and was inspired by terminal.shop (the coffee one). Figured if you can order coffee from your terminal, you should be able to order a t-shirt too.

how it works: you describe what you want, it generates ASCII art, shows you a mockup on an actual shirt, and you can check out right there.

  pip install ascii-tee

  ascii-tee "sunflower"

Stack:

- CLI: Typer + Rich for the interactive flow (prompts, spinners, panels)

  - ASCII generation: Claude API, with a system prompt tuned for a 40×30 character canvas that prints well

  - Preview: Pillow composites the ASCII (rendered with JetBrains Mono) onto a shirt mockup template

  - Terminal images: Detects iTerm2/Kitty/WezTerm for native inline images, falls back to timg or chafa, then browser

  - Backend: Cloudflare Workers handling API calls

  - Checkout: Stripe, with the preview image shown on the payment page

  - Fulfillment: Printful prints and ships (Bella+Canvas 3001)

First time building something like this so would appreciate any feedback.