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Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

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Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#121

Post by Wowfunhappy »

fernie wrote: post #55
bigfishrunning wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why be exclusive? Why not "Chart language for computer programs to generate"? I don't want to use an agent at all, but i wouldn't mind generating some charts with an easy-to-generate markup language...

But for that we already have mermaid.js (and its precursor Graphviz/dot). The only reason to use this instead of existing, mature ones designed for humans is if you are an AI agent.

I'd ask the question in reverse too. Why not let the AI agent use mermaid.js/graphviz/dot?

Presumably Microsoft thinks this one is better. Why? And why would that answer be any different for a human vs an LLM?

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#122

Post by RandyRanderson »

Expressing charts in XML, JSON, etc is a terrible idea. There are several existing examples of this.

Ppl who think this is a good idea should be compelled to maintain some M4 or other configuration "files". These configuration files ALWAYS devolve into a full language if they are actually used. So now you have the language you wrote your app in and then you have another, shittier language for your configs ... that you have to maintain.

Please stop doing this.

What should we do? In this case just express the chart in a natural language. Where there are uncertainties, the LLM should ask questions to clarify and record the results.

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#123

Post by efromvt »

Semantic types as the extra formatting factor is super useful because they are concise encodings of a lot of formatting boilerplate.[1] Do you envision the flint type registry being shared/extensible? Why not have that be a data property itself?

[1] landed on pretty much the same spec for higher level tether charting on vegalite

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#124

Post by ywvcbk »

smallerize wrote: post #86
avadodin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mermaid looks terrible. It is only better than nothing for the purpose of showing it to people whether produced by an LLM, by a human, or by both. Your employees may just accept the internal slop, but at some point, you have to show your charts to your customer.

Doesn't that depend on the style that you apply to it?

No? I don't think there is a way to meaningfully change the layout for non trivial charts?

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#126

Post by alansaber »

cpard wrote: post #26

There’s an emerging pattern in agentic systems and this project is a great example. A deterministic layer like a compiler or generator of code with some kind of IR that the LLM generates and feeds it with. I feel we will be seeing this more and more in the near future.

Yes, this has been the pattern for agentic systems since the beginning: permissive generation, that retries over and over until it gets the right size shape through the hole, and the input validates.

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#127

Post by rightlane »

cpard wrote: post #26

There’s an emerging pattern in agentic systems and this project is a great example. A deterministic layer like a compiler or generator of code with some kind of IR that the LLM generates and feeds it with. I feel we will be seeing this more and more in the near future.

I'm all in on this idea. Every piece of agentic coding I have done in the last month has been via an intermediate representation. Iteration is done in the IR layer mainly. It's remarkable how close you can get to a deterministic coding output using this methodology.

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#128

Post by nxobject »

kristjansson wrote: post #109
rbalicki wrote: post #27

"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!

The "curb cut effect", right? I'm sure there's a human-friendly interface to MCPs myself. I think we're reinventing application scripting that way.

Re: Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

#130

Post by kbd »

rbalicki wrote: post #27

"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.

Thank you for summarizing it this way. All their flowery language (esp from OP) seems like long for "we figure out how the chart should look based on its data". From their page:

> Instead of requiring verbose low-level parameters such as scales, axes, spacing, and layout, the Flint compiler derives optimized chart settings from the data, semantic types, chart type, and encodings.

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