There is a version of learning to code where the goal is just to make the thing run. You write it, you test it locally, it does what it is supposed to do, and that feels like the finish line. For a while, that was me. ascii-art-web changed that. The project was straightforward on paper — take the ASCII art CLI I had already built and put it behind a Go HTTP server with a browser interface. Same logic, new layer. I figured it would be a lighter week. It was not. The standard library in Go handles HTTP cleanly but it does not hide anything from you. Every route has to be defined. Every status code has to be intentional. The audit requirements were specific — 400 for bad input, 404 for missing routes, 500 when the server breaks. Not approximately right. Exactly right. I had written code before that worked in the sense that it produced correct output. This was the first time I had to write code that behaved correctly under conditions I had not planned for.…