Choosing JSON spec might be a bad idea.
It's machine friendly but not exactly LLM friendly.
Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first saw Claude generating PPT decks by writing Python code instead of making the XML directly, it was sort of an "aha moment" for me. This seems to be the path for many things. It also feels slightly limiting, and like a hack LONG term, but 100% correct approach for a while.
Have you seen marp? https://marp.app/
This is awesome
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Graphviz and mermaid are a shitshow. anything more than their own handpicked examples and you're better off using d3 or yfiles. layering, clustering, boundaries, rearranging are all basic needs for text to diagrams. None support it. Both suck at being any good for rendering diagrams from readable structured text. There is a gap to be addressed.
I find it lacks some easy way to do alignments or grouping, which makes editing frustrating. Could be a good language re-design opportunity.
yes and that led me to a more fundamental question : is it even possible for an easy way to do fine grained adjustments. The finer granularity brings complexity. that makes it unreadable (especially for the untrained) and hence set aside and forgotten. The other way is to narrow down and focus on a well defined subset of problems.
either way the number of people willing or compelled to learn it will be tiny. and it hence becomes a niche, perfect for a long-term side project but with no real return.
my conclusion was to stop looking and use D3 or custom code ( good looking charts for humans).
this project is trying to do the same, balance verbosity in text with granularity in the charts with a narrowish usecase : agent consumption.
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on what you mean? Why is it more difficult to deal with formatters, scales, annotations compared with other solutions? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the defaults are similar to what you would get in Flint, and if you want to add or customise anything, it's usually just one extra line. That's kind of the entire point of the grammar of graphics.
https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/ The "how it works" section explains a little bit of this. For example, for the heatmap example showing temporal data, for a "good-looking" chart, we need to (1) reconcile the conflict between banded discrete steps and continuous temporal axis, and it requires understanding and setting stepsize and time parser, (2) for the correlation color, we need to set domain etc under th…
Thanks for the amazing work! How to follow up on reading the paper when available ?
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it lacks some easy way to do alignments or grouping, which makes editing frustrating. Could be a good language re-design opportunity.
yes and that led me to a more fundamental question : is it even possible for an easy way to do fine grained adjustments. The finer granularity brings complexity. that makes it unreadable (especially for the untrained) and hence set aside and forgotten. The other way is to narrow down and focus on a well defined subset of problems. either way the number of people willing or compelled to learn it will be tiny. and it h…
That's the best option for now. But it can also be frustrating to ask AI to do small edits on D3 just to fix some idioms (like switching order etc) and they kept messing up with other stuff accidentally. Thus I still believe have a language with native representation for these diagram concepts would be helpful.
Good news is that AI do make new language a bit more accessible than before! If your agents can use it well and you can steer easily, it will naturally be good adoption.
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#106Hard not to reflexively reference the XKCD here. I think the authors of most charting languages would say they look good by default. It seems more likely this is achieving a subjectively different presentation than something objectively better. Higher level implies information loss. So it can only be better if it is doing so by assuming some better defaults. But then you have to ask if it lost expressiveness.
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#107Hard not to reflexively reference the XKCD here. I think the authors of most charting languages would say they look good by default. It seems more likely this is achieving a subjectively different presentation than something objectively better. Higher level implies information loss. So it can only be better if it is doing so by assuming some better defaults. But then you have to ask if it lost expressiveness.
We find an additional dimension where previous language doesn't explicitly use (semantic type) as the key part of the specification, which turned out to be the root reason of why certain low-level parameters are set.
Effectively Flint is designed to specify charts using another set of semantic parameters over geometric parameters, which happens to be something AI are pretty good at! (They can based on field names + sample values to infer the semantic types reliably than guessing geometrical params.
Btw, for others reading this comment, this is the XKCD we are talking about! https://xkcd.com/927/
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/ The "how it works" section explains a little bit of this. For example, for the heatmap example showing temporal data, for a "good-looking" chart, we need to (1) reconcile the conflict between banded discrete steps and continuous temporal axis, and it requires understanding and setting stepsize and time parser, (2) for the correlation color, we need to set domain etc under th…
Thanks for the amazing work! How to follow up on reading the paper when available ?
We will link it on github and the project page!
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#109"For AI agents". I understand why everything needs to be marketed in this way, but it's just ... an easy-to-generate language for expressing charts. That's impressive! That's useful.
This can’t be said enough. “Good for Agents” just means self-documenting, obvious ergonomics, save defaults, succinct (or controllable) output, programable interfaces, … all of which support human users too!
Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
#110https://github.com/tcsenpai/flint-chart-skill
Here is a skill using that (tested)