I had absolutely no past knowledge of coding. Zero.

Mid-August 2025, I started using Claude Code. And not a day has gone since where I haven’t opened the terminal.

That’s not an exaggeration. Every. Single. Day.

The Spark

You know what I noticed? Every time I opened Claude Code or Gemini CLI, they had these beautiful banners that greeted me. Clean. Professional. Welcoming.

I thought: “I want that.”

So I went down the path of creating my own banner. And now, every time I open my terminal, this shows up:

Genesis Flow Terminal Banner

It’s small. It’s simple. But it’s mine.

The Journey

Here’s the thing about learning to code with AI: you don’t need years of experience to build something cool. You need curiosity and a willingness to figure it out.

I didn’t know what figlet was. I didn’t know about ANSI escape codes or gradient colors in terminals. I just knew I wanted a banner.

So I asked Claude. We built it together. Iterated. Made mistakes. Fixed them. Made it better.

That’s the whole process.

What I Learned

Building this taught me more than just how to make a pretty terminal banner:

  • Figlet generates ASCII art - There’s a tool for that. Who knew?
  • Colors are just numbers - ANSI 256-color palette. Mind blown.
  • Shell scripts can be elegant - Not just cryptic one-liners.
  • Small wins matter - Seeing that banner every morning? Dopamine hit.

Why You Should Build One

Look, you might think a terminal banner is trivial. Maybe it is.

But it’s yours. It’s a reminder that you’re building things. That you showed up. That you’re in the arena.

Every time I open my terminal and see “⚡ Your code shapes reality. Make it legendary. ⚡” — I believe it a little more.

That’s not fluff. That’s real.

The Code

I made it open source: genesis-flow-banner on GitHub

Fork it. Change the colors. Make it yours. Break it. Fix it. Learn from it.

The Point

There’s so much to learn in this world. I’m just sharing my bits and pieces.

Three months ago, I didn’t know what a shell was. Today, I have a terminal banner with gradient colors and animated ASCII art.

Tomorrow? Who knows.

But I’ll be in the terminal. Building. Learning. Iterating.

One banner at a time.

This is entry #2 in my AI mastery journey. No fluff. Just real experiments and what I learned from them.