> Let me show you what ASCII prototyping looks like.
In my web browser, on your website: broken. None of the things align and it looks really bad.
ASCII-Driven Development
81–90 of 97 posts
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#82Author here. High-level: - Problem: AI UI generators are high-fidelity by default → teams bikeshed aesthetics before structure is right. - Idea: use ASCII as an intentionally low-fidelity “layout spec” to lock hierarchy/flow first. Why ASCII: - forces abstraction (no colors/fonts/shadows) - very fast to iterate (seconds) - pasteable anywhere (Slack/Notion/GitHub) - editable by anyone Workflow: - describe UI → generat…
Fwiw, your diagrams look completely broken to me: nothing aligns well, making everything unreadable.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#83This is a tangential point (this post is not really about TUIs; sort of the opposite) and I think lots of people know it already but I only figured it out last week and so can't resist sharing it: agents are good at driving tmux, and with tmux as a "browser", can verify TUI layouts. So you can draw layouts like this and prompt Claude or Gemini with them, and get back working versions, which to me is space alien techn…
I’ve actually got an MCP server that makes it really easy for Claude to generate key events, wait for changes / wait for stable output / etc, and then take PNG screenshots of the terminal state (including all colors/styling) — which it “views” directly as part of the MCP tool response.
Wish I could open source it; it’s a game changer for TUI development.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#84How come pen & paper are omitted from both article and discussion?
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#85Most ascii/unicode based diagrams spit out by AI have misaligned boxes, similar to the ones generated in the article. I’m not affiliated, but to clean them up you can use something like ascii-guard ( https://github.com/fxstein/ascii-guard ) which is a linter that will clean it up. Beats doing it by hand after multiple attempts telling AI to do it and repeatedly fail.
Thank you! Open source truly is a gift.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#86I like the idea but I think it's going to be hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle. As an engineering leader, I prefer low fidelity designs early on, but practically no one else in my company wants that. Designers have learned figma and it's the de facto tool for them; doing something else is risky for them. Product leaders want high fidelity. They love the AI tools that let them produce high fidelity…
I'm about to deliver a proposal to a prospect with ascii mocks, we'll see how it goes. I am the product leader.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#87I like the idea but I think it's going to be hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle. As an engineering leader, I prefer low fidelity designs early on, but practically no one else in my company wants that. Designers have learned figma and it's the de facto tool for them; doing something else is risky for them. Product leaders want high fidelity. They love the AI tools that let them produce high fidelity…
I'm about to deliver a proposal to a prospect with ascii mocks, we'll see how it goes. I am the product leader.
and tbf I've used low fidelity to engage stakeholders imagination long before ai was making ascii for me.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#88I think this a good technique to be familiar with, although in a lot of situations I've achieved similar value by simply feeding the underlying JSON data objects corresponding to the intended UI state back into the coding agent. It doesn't render quite as nicely, but it is often still human-readable, and more importantly both LLM and procedurally interpretable, meaning you can fold the results back into your agentic…
I went down this path with fluxwing, it works really well but it was slow.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#89We built https://github.com/trabian/fluxwing-skills to handle some of this use case. For the most part it's now on the shelf but we use the react-ink toolkit for similar things. It's faster and aligns better.
Re: ASCII-Driven Development
#90This is a tangential point (this post is not really about TUIs; sort of the opposite) and I think lots of people know it already but I only figured it out last week and so can't resist sharing it: agents are good at driving tmux, and with tmux as a "browser", can verify TUI layouts. So you can draw layouts like this and prompt Claude or Gemini with them, and get back working versions, which to me is space alien techn…
I’ve actually got an MCP server that makes it really easy for Claude to generate key events, wait for changes / wait for stable output / etc, and then take PNG screenshots of the terminal state (including all colors/styling) — which it “views” directly as part of the MCP tool response. Wish I could open source it; it’s a game changer for TUI development.
If anyone wants to do this at home, this is a great base to work from: