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ASCII-Driven Development

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Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#91

Post by Kerrick »

tptacek wrote: post #3

This 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 had a lot of good luck with AI Agents also being able to read and meaningfully interprete .txt and .ansi dumps from RatatuiRuby's TestHelper module and its `assert_snapshots` [0].

For example, it was able to read the ANSI and figure out that a snapshot had changed because an upstream bug properly rendered bold and underline when it hadn't before.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/trunk/item/lib/...

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#92

Post by mrstackdump »

_sinelaw_ wrote: post #76
mrstackdump wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see your prompt if you ever post it anywhere.

For Claude, it's enough to prompt "use tmux to test", that usually does the work out of the box. If colors are important I also add "use -e option with capture-pane to see colors". It just works. I used it regularly with Claude and my TUI. For other agents other than Claude I need to use a more specific set of instructions ("use send-keys, capture-pane and mouse control via tmux" etc.) Since I have e2e tests, I only…

Thank you!

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#93

Post by ralferoo »

Unfortunately, the one thing this article needs to get right is broken: the examples.

On my screen (Chrome on Windows on 1080p screen), it's in a scrollable box filling the middle half of the width of the screen. Some of the screens are set to display so many rows in the viewport, I have to scroll down several screenfuls to get to the horizontal scrollbar to view the right hand half, and then I can't see all the important stuff at the top right.

Secondly, mixing in emojis makes the font non-proportional so most of the screens don't line up properly. This isn't ASCII driven development, it's not even iso8859-1 driven development.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#94

Post by sedatk »

nmstoker wrote: post #65
sedatk wrote: post #23

Off-topic but I’m so happy to have moved out of Medium.

Curious to understand what drove that the most? Certainly for this article, Medium's annoying way it blocks zooming in/out on images when on mobile is limiting and frustrating! But I sense you'll have broader concerns...

The way Medium used my non-monetized account as a subscription/registration trampoline. I was basically always behind a registration/pay wall against my wishes.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#95

Post by _blk »

Made my day, thanks. I use this so much. Even before AI. With AsciiFlow it has the feel of a whiteboard, but you can shift stuff around.

I'll draw simple UI prototypes then rearrange and/or document. I can also easily share it with a colleague to comment or modify.

Here's one:

https://asciiflow.com/#/share/eJztXE1v2zYY%2FivvNAxwsDRBlrTA...)

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#96

Post by oasisbob »

iamanllm wrote: post #71
oasisbob wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are sentence fragments, not perfect sentences. They're useful in some contexts, but are inappropriate for more formalized writing. When LLMs reuse the same patterns dozens of times in a single article, the patterns stops being interesting or surprising and just become obnoxious and grating.

it's not formal writing it's a blog post.

By "formal" I would include online writing advocating for particular development methodologies like this one.

Re: ASCII-Driven Development

#97

Post by nacozarina »

some1else wrote: post #84

How come pen & paper are omitted from both article and discussion?

Not many of us scratchers left.

For many years now, I’ve been the only person that ever brings pen & paper to a meeting and writes things down.

I’ve tried to limit it because whenever I do the yoots look at me weird.

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