Haiku Beat Opus?! Claude AI Coding Challenge EP03

Haiku Beat Opus?! Claude AI Coding Challenge EP03

In this episode of the LLM Coding Challenge, three Claude models—Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku—compete to generate ASCII-art pyramids with cycling symbols using a single-shot prompt. The challenge evaluates their code on eight criteria, including output correctness, Pythonic style, documentation, and code structure, revealing Haiku as the top performer with a perfect score.

Code

def ascii_pyramid(height, symbols):
  """
  Generate an ASCII pyramid of given height using cycling symbols.

  Args:
    height (int): Number of pyramid levels.
    symbols (str): String of symbols to cycle through.

  Returns:
    str: Multi-line string representing the pyramid.
  """
  lines = []
  for i in range(1, height + 1):
    # Select symbols cycling through the provided string
    line_symbols = ''.join(symbols[(j % len(symbols))] for j in range(i))
    # Center the line to form a pyramid shape
    lines.append(line_symbols.center(height))
  return '\n'.join(lines)

if __name__ == "__main__":
  pyramid = ascii_pyramid(5, "*-+")
  print(pyramid)

Key Points

• The pyramid is built line by line, cycling through a string of symbols for each level.
• Using Python's .center() method simplifies spacing and alignment of pyramid lines.
• Including a clear docstring and a main guard improves code readability and usability.
• Generating output as a single string allows easy printing or further processing.
• Comparing AI-generated code highlights different approaches to the same problem and best practices.