71–80 of 165 posts
this just triggers my entire spectrum of love for this text-to-diagram, but I always struggle with increasing difficulty managing content as the complexity grows.
These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…
And I think they’ve gotten to the point where “how can LLMs change this workflow” is a much more impactful question than basically any other UX improvement
Looks nice, and much nicer from plantuml class diagrams [0]. [0]: https://plantuml.com/class-diagram
These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…
These markup languages are often not competing with "making a single diagram with drag&drop", though. Lets say you're making lots of variations, then having it in a specified format for easy changes is nice. Or diffing changes. Or programmatically generate them.
But in all those cases wouldn't it better to have something with an actual API in a programming language you are familiar with? Or at least a tool the takes something like JSON, for which there already are great tools for parsing, generating and manipulating.
These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…
These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will…
We don't have many options of approved diagramming software where I work though. Omnigraffle which I don't care much for, and Visio which doesn't work on Mac. Maybe I'd have a different opinion of we had something proper.
For random boxes and arrows I do typically go for Excalidraw though.
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Isn't that the point of posting/ commenting on HN? So that we can discuss about the post? I see something on HN and after checking it, I would definitely comment on HN first.
As someone who has been working on open source software for 5 years now, GitHub issues are my primary source of truth for what users want and how to go about prioritizing features. If people can’t be bothered to log an issue or thumbs-up/comment on an existing one, it can’t be such an important thing to them.
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I got quite far asking an LLM to type it out for me. and I got some nice diagrams to visualize the project I was thinking about.
GPT4 was surprisingly good at generating dot (Graphviz) files when I tried, and even managed to do reasonable visual layout of nodes (it's an interesting test, both because reasoning about visual constraints in text is tricky and because good diagram layout algorithms are complex)
Getting a good layout is too dependent on the order of definition. I can see that becoming unsolvable for the user for large diagrams but seems ok for small ones. For example the following gives an ugly yet valid layout of the example: [more loot] no ->[ e] [ start] -> [ plunder] -> [ more loot] -> [start] [Pirate| [foul mouth] mischief| bawl | sing || yell | drink ] [ Marauder] Jolly;Sailor] [sailor]->[rum] [Pirate]…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPT4 was surprisingly good at generating dot (Graphviz) files when I tried, and even managed to do reasonable visual layout of nodes (it's an interesting test, both because reasoning about visual constraints in text is tricky and because good diagram layout algorithms are complex)
It's decent at mermaid too, but the one time I tried it for something complex there I found it was just easier to do the diagram myself