Droeftoeter is a new open-source terminal application, written in Go, that uses an LLM as a live code generator for ASCII art animations. Released in March 2026, it gives users a 64x32 character grid and a prompt input — type something, and the model extends the currently running Go code to produce whatever you asked for. The author calls it 'a toddler's first coding agent.' That's self-deprecating, but the loop it implements is the same one underlying far more serious systems: read current state, receive instruction, generate an extension, execute.
The project supports Anthropic's Claude, Groq's Llama (free tier), Google Gemini (also free), any OpenAI-compatible endpoint including OpenRouter and DeepSeek, and local Ollama models. That last option matters: the whole thing runs offline, on local hardware, without an API key. Someone with no paid subscriptions can be generating animations within minutes using Groq or Gemini's free tiers.
The constrained output domain — Go code, fixed grid — is what keeps the agent loop functional. The model always has context because it sees the currently running code before generating its extension. There's no planner, no tool registry, no retry logic. The human prompts, the model extends, the terminal renders. It's a minimal implementation of what researchers call human-in-the-loop generative refinement, and in this case it produces something that works as a creative instrument. The author has said they'd like to see it used for live VJ sets at an algorave.
Droeftoeter shipped four releases in under three days — v0.1.0 on March 10 to v0.1.3 on March 12. It's MIT-licensed, with pre-built binaries on GitHub Releases. Not every useful contribution to the agent ecosystem is a multi-step reasoning pipeline.