41–50 of 81 posts
... as the kids would say: "weak sauce"
... and it's just a tool to create charts not a "visualization language"
you could probably vibeslop a pipeline from some ad-hoc DSL to excel or pandas or R and get a better integration with your business context
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…
How would you quantify the magic of these older charts? What is it that makes them have charm and character?
So this is one interface that can render to multiple charting backends? If AI is writing the "Flint", why not just have it write the backend code instead? I'm not sure why I would want pluggable charting backends. I can see an argument for providing simpler APIs for LLMs, though, so that it can be more token efficient for example.
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.
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 stating the obvious.
What is wrong with "please make plot XYZ in plotly?"
unfortunately JSON is doomed to fail in "the AI era" LLMs are surprisingly bad at generating JSON.
Are they in 2026? I haven't had an issue with json and LLMs in a long while
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 !