Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era • Hacker News Board

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#61

Post by lenkite » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:11 PM UTC

cyanregiment wrote: post #50

afro88 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they in 2026? I haven't had an issue with json and LLMs in a long while

JSON, CSS, JS config files… for me it tends to omit fields and produce unwanted or duplicate ones. But way less so in TS. Because the types/interfaces are there to guide it further. So everyone’s adding types everywhere: “Agent friendly” What would a CSS type system look like !

I would love a CSS type system for humans. The language never stays in my brain for more than 2 weeks and then I have to re-learn it from scratch.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#62

Post by nylonstrung » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:13 PM UTC

akst wrote: post #10

Even in the Era AI, GGPlot's API is still the best charting API. The name "Grammar of Graphics" isn't just marketing, they literally sought to write a god damn grammar to was capable of expressing all possible qualitative graphics. They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/0-387-28695-0 I actually stumbled upon this book w…

Yeah Grammar of Graphics semantics are already very ideal for both humans and agents alike. Ggsql is a recent project that implements it as SQL user defined functions which is even more agent friendly

I dont see what this brings to the table

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#63

Post by cyanregiment » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #61

cyanregiment wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSON, CSS, JS config files… for me it tends to omit fields and produce unwanted or duplicate ones. But way less so in TS. Because the types/interfaces are there to guide it further. So everyone’s adding types everywhere: “Agent friendly” What would a CSS type system look like !

I would love a CSS type system for humans. The language never stays in my brain for more than 2 weeks and then I have to re-learn it from scratch.

Same, and I guess it already is (pretty strongly) typed but yeah

> for humans

And dare I say “agents” - it’d be nice to have very nuanced types

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#64

Post by chrisweekly » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

HawtAds wrote: post #36

awestroke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different charting backends support different kinds of charts. Being able to easily switch between "ECharts Sunburst" and "Vega-Lite faceted bar" - one of the examples on the project website - seems like a super useful ability.

Interesting, TanStack Charts was also released a couple days ago with a similar design. https://tanstack.com/charts/latest

Yeah I was going to share it too. I watched a yt video yesterday where Tanner talks about how (in contrast to trad component-based libs) it takes a very different approach to composition, letting D3 do the heavy lifting and using its visual grammar, and staying grounded in putting the data (not the component tree) first.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#65

Post by Hawzen » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

My conspiracy theory is that this was not related to AI in any capacity, but it was tacked on because ai

The linked website has only two mentions of AI, and one of them is the title, the approach isn't AI-centric in any meaningful sense either

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#66

Post by fr2029 » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

boomskats wrote: post #44

This needs a side-by-side config comparison with something like echarts config schema format. I really don't see the point. I'm 99% sure the verbosity required in the system prompt to teach non-M$ models this new ever-so-slightly-different-but-not-obviously-necessary chart def abstraction format, and the iterations required to get it right, will outweigh any supposed efficiency gains resulting from using it. Just sta…

[dead]

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#67

Post by myshapeprotocol » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#68

Post by infecto » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

What is the point of this. I already can get an llm to draw charts using plotly, matplotlib, echarts, etc all the time. There will be always a better way but what does this buy us?