What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?
I use this for traking change with git.
Monosketch
81–90 of 144 posts
Re: Monosketch
#82Seeing projects with first commits from 3-4 years ago feels like finding pre nuclear testing steel. No strong proof exists that this project was not conceived as slop.
LLM bots are gonna start back dating commits to look more legit.
Re: Monosketch
#83What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?
agents can understand them. and you can view them in the terminal
Re: Monosketch
#84Re: Monosketch
#85What's old is new again. This takes me back thirty-odd years to some ASCII drawing program I used to use in DOS. I can't recall if it was somehow part of WordPerfect or its own thing.
Re: Monosketch
#86That circuit schematic in the header is wrong enough to look like an AI-generated hallucination of what a schematic is from the "human with extra fingers" stage of image generation. Inconsistent symbol styles, missing pin labels, a shorted capacitor in the upper-left, etc.
The worst part about all this isn't the fact the experts can immediately see the inadequacies of the AI tool, it's that newbies are joyously learning incorrectly. How can the Experts of the Future have a solid foundation if their foundation is built on a bunch of "your absolutely right!" LLM corrections?
Re: Monosketch
#87What's old is new again. This takes me back thirty-odd years to some ASCII drawing program I used to use in DOS. I can't recall if it was somehow part of WordPerfect or its own thing.
I remember being able to "draw" these types of boxes/shapes in Turbo Pascal.
Re: Monosketch
#88Pedantic note to people using 'ASCII' in this thread (although Monosketch tool does't (EDIT actually does) claim to be ASCII). It uses e.g. "◎" U+25CE BULLSEYE which definitely isn't. And the 'ascii-driven-development' blog post mentioned downthread even uses emojis.
A historical note: even though the line/box-drawing characters go back to the IBM PC, they aren't ASCII. The PC used Code page 437, which added a bunch of characters to ASCII. To be genuinely ASCII, you need to draw your boxes with pipes and hyphens (| and -).
Re: Monosketch
#89Seeing projects with first commits from 3-4 years ago feels like finding pre nuclear testing steel. No strong proof exists that this project was not conceived as slop.
LLM bots are gonna start back dating commits to look more legit.
Yep, i absolutely expect this to happen, the quality signals that humans use are going to be forever in flux now as the humans try to stay ahead of the bots.
Re: Monosketch
#90What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?
My unpopular opinion is that programming is stuck in the 1970s: a lot of programmers use a 1970s-style terminal window to enter 1970s OS commands, which run on a 1970s processor architecture (which is slowly getting replaced by a 1980s architecture). They use a 1970s editor (which is much superior to the other 1970s editor) to write programs in a 1970s language. ASCII diagrams are just a symptom of this. Hardware is millions of times better than in the 1970s, but programming is stuck in local optimums for historical reasons.
(Not to take anything away from Monosketch, which is cool.)