Thanks for the clarification! Glad you can cater to both worlds.

For diagramming and even UI prototyping I keep getting back to plain old ascii drawings though. Asciiflow.com is fantastic. I just wish they had vim keybindings. It's also great to embed in .md too. Could mermaid generate ascii? It just seems easier to comprehend and doesn't need a separate renderer.

No it can not. That's an interesting idea, though, but one would need to navigate/differentiate between the rendered output text and the Mermaid diagram code.