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ASCII-Driven Development

medium.com

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#11

Neat concept and very inspirational. Is ascii/unicode text UI the way to go here or is there other UI formats even more suited for LLMs?

LLMs are surprisingly good at extracting data from other data, so at the end of the day there is no right or wrong, it's what works best for you use case.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#12
Great idea, thanks for sharing! Tried your prompts with ChatGPT and Claude than iterated on it. The ASCII doesn't render perfectly in the web interface but looks good when copy/pasted into a text editor. Key benefit: I used to iterate on layout by generating HTML+Tailwind directly, which burns tokens fast. This ASCII approach lets you nail the structure first without the token cost. Much better for free tier usage. Appreciate the writeup!

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#14
A really interesting article, and I'm likely to give it a shot a work. I'm grateful for it, and yet I found it difficult to get through because of a sense of "LLM style" in the prose.

I won't speculate on whether the post is AI-written or whether the author has adopted quirks from LLM outputs into their own way of writing because it doesn't really matter. Something about this "feeling" in the writing causes me discomfort, and I don't even really know why. It's almost like a tightness in my jaw or a slight ache in my molars.

Every time I read something like, "Not as an aesthetic choice. Not as nostalgia. *But as a thinking tool*" in an article I had until then taken on faith was produced in the voice of a human being feels like a let down. Maybe it's just the sense that I believed I was connecting with another person, albeit indirectly, and then I feel the loss of that. But that's not entirely convincing, because I genuinely found the points this article was making interesting, and no doubt they came originally from the author's mind.

Since this is happening more and more, I'd be interested to hear what others' experiences with encountering LLM-seeming blog posts (especially of inherently interesting underlying content) has been like.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#15

Like the idea, but this is definitely Unicode and not ASCII. It's hard to believe someone finished a piece of this length but still misunderstood, especially when some examples have emoji in them. Alternately, they chose a misleading name on purpose. Why? Someone mentioned TUI, which sidesteps the issue entirely.

It kind of makes sense if you relate it to ASCII art, which is very often not ASCII for similar reasons. The naming evokes that concept for me at least. Naming is hard in general, I'm sure they tried to find a name that they thought worked best.

I agree that "TUI" is a better fit though. But not TUI-driven-development, more like TUI-driven-design, followed by using the textual design as a spec (i.e. spec-driven development) to drive GUI implementation via coding agents.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#16
Trouble with this is, it's pretty much LLM-only. I don't want to type out a request for Clause to draw a box for me and describe where, and I don't want to be pasting box-drawing characters. I want to click & drag. This is just boxes, arrows, and labels, which are all WAY faster to make by hand.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#17

Neat concept and very inspirational. Is ascii/unicode text UI the way to go here or is there other UI formats even more suited for LLMs?

It has to be suited for human consumption too though.

I wonder if this has any real benefits over just doing very simple html wireframing with highly constrained css, which is readily renderable for human consumption. I guess pure text makes it easier to ignore many stylistic factors as they are harder to represent if not impossible. But I'm sure that LLMs have a lot more training data on html/css, and I'd expect them to easily follow instructions to produce html/css for a mockup/wireframe.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#19
> Examples: UIs in ASCII

The examples are using non-ASCII characters. They also don’t render with a consistent grid on all (any?) browsers.

Maybe they meant plain-text-driven development?

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