I like to make these kinds of mock ups using https://asciiflow.com . Some of the components from the article paste nicely there.
https://cascii.app many more features :)
ASCII-Driven Development
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#22I love it conceptually, but I can't get past the abject failure of the right edges of boxes to be properly aligned. Because of a mishmash of non-fixed-width characters (emoji, etc.), each line has a slightly different length and the right edges of boxes are a jagged mess and I can't see anything else until that's cleaned up.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#23Off-topic but I’m so happy to have moved out of Medium.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#24A 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 discom…
"Not as an aesthetic choice. Not as nostalgia. But as a thinking tool" is a perfectly normal sentence, and I think there is an equally bad trend of people assuming things are AI written and forget that AI was trained on human writing. But to your point, agreed there is a disconnect when things are in fact written by AI, but I skimmed the article anyway so to me it didn't matter lol.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#25A 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 discom…
I've had too many LLMs tell me that software product ABC can do XYZ, but when I actually read the ABC documentation I discover that that hallucination was the opposite of reality: the docs say "we cannot do XYZ yet but we're working on it." So for me, the question at the back of my mind when I encounter an obviously LLM-generated article is always, "So which parts of this article are factually correct, and which parts are hallucinations?" I care less about the "human voice" aspect than about the factual correctness of the technical facts presented in the article.
In this particular case, if the facts about how many years ago various products came out are wrong, it doesn't matter since I'm never going to be relying on that fact anyway. The fact that what the author is proposing isn't ASCII, it's UTF-8-encoded Unicode (emojis aren't ASCII) doesn't matter (and I rather suspect that this particular factual error would have been present even if he had written the text entirely by hand with no LLM input), because again, I'm not going to be relying on that fact for anything. The idea he presents is interesting, and is obviously possible.
So I care less about the "voice" of an article, but a LOT about its accuracy.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#26I really like this idea. I’ve seen teams get stuck quibbling about details too early while using Figma. I see how this totally sidesteps that problem, similar to working with analog drawings, but with the advantage that it’s still electronic so you can stuff it into your repo and version it and also feed it into an LLM easily. I’m really curious how the LLM “sees” it. Sure, it’s characters, but it’s not language. Regardless, very cool idea. Can’t wait to give it a try.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#27Wide character width is yet another billion dollar mistake. Impossible to make emojis look right together with monospaced font across devices/programs.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#28What tools can we actually use to draw ASCII manually if desired? None are mentioned. E.g I made https://cascii.app for exactly this purpose.
plantuml
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#29I love it conceptually, but I can't get past the abject failure of the right edges of boxes to be properly aligned. Because of a mishmash of non-fixed-width characters (emoji, etc.), each line has a slightly different length and the right edges of boxes are a jagged mess and I can't see anything else until that's cleaned up.
Emojis mixed with ASCII-era characters are hard to get right. Some terminal emulators get it right nearly all the time (e.g. Ghostty, which has had a lot of thought and effort put into getting it right) and yet there are still open issues in the Ghostty repo about inconsistent character width. There are just so many corner cases that it's hard.
That said, the edge alignment is, I believe, caused by the fact that LLMs are involved in the process. Because the LLMs never "see" the final visual representation that humans see. Their "view" of the world is text-based, and in the text file, those columns line up because they have the same number of UTF-8 codepoints in the row. So the LLMs do not realize that the right edges are misaligned visually. (And since the workflow described is for an LLM to take that text file as input and produce an output in React/Vue/Svelte/whatever, the visual alignment of the text file needs to stay LLM-oriented for it to work properly. I assume, of course, since I haven't tried this myself).
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#30I love it conceptually, but I can't get past the abject failure of the right edges of boxes to be properly aligned. Because of a mishmash of non-fixed-width characters (emoji, etc.), each line has a slightly different length and the right edges of boxes are a jagged mess and I can't see anything else until that's cleaned up.
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