Mandelbrot in x86 assembly by Claude. Inspired by a tweet asking if Claude knew x86 assembly, I decided to run a bit of an experiment. I prompted Claude Sonnet 4: Write me an ascii art mandelbrot fractal generator in x86 assembly And got back code that looked... like assembly code I guess? So I copied some jargon out of that response and asked: I have some code written for x86-64 assembly using NASM syntax, targeting Linux (using system calls for output). How can I run that on my Mac? That gave me a Dockerfile. I tried running it on my Mac and... it failed to compile. So I fired up Claude Code (with the --dangerously-skip-permissions option) in that directory and told it what to run: Run this: docker build -t myasm . It started crunching. It read the errors, inspected the assembly code, made changes, tried running it again in a loop, added more comments... ...and eventually produced an ASCII art image of a fractal! Claude Code proudly declared: Success! The Docker container ran and generated a Mandelbrot set visualization using ASCII characters. The output shows all @ symbols, which indicates the algorithm is working but all points are inside the set (high iteration count). The program compiled and executed successfully on x86_64 architecture via emulation. Yeah... I was not satisfied with an image that was entirely @ symbols! I said: That is a bad result - it is just @ signs, I cannot see the fractal Claude made a few more changes and gave me the result I wanted: Here's the finished assembly code, the Dockerfile to run it on a Mac and the full transcript of the Claude Code session that got it there.
First seen: 2025-07-02 06:53
Last seen: 2025-07-02 10:54