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_hfqa 21 hours ago

Author 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 → generate ASCII → iterate on structure/states → feed into v0/Lovable/Bolt/etc → polish visuals last

It also facilitates discussion:

- everyone argues about structure/decisions, not pixels

- feedback is concrete (“move this”, “add a section”), not subjective

More advanced setups could integrate user/customer support feedback to automatically propose changes to a spec or PRD, enabling downstream tasks to later produce PRs.

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tasuki 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fwiw, your diagrams look completely broken to me: nothing aligns well, making everything unreadable.

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NetOpWibby 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with ASCII-driven development for me is that emoji ruin the alignment. It’d be nice if they could be forced into monospaced. Emoji aren’t ASCII so maybe that’s the problem too.

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Izkata 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seems like there's more going on with it than that, it's also affecting the lines that don't have emoji. It kind of looks like it assumes every vertical bar takes up two characters so a space before the bar is missing. Except not always.

Example 2 has five boxes in a row each with a number 1 to 5 in them, and each box is missing a single space before the second vertical bar... I think the problem might be centering, where it needs to distribute 3 spaces on either side of the text, divides by 2 to get 1.5, then truncates both sides to 1, instead of doing 1 on one side and 2 on the other. Doesn't quite fit with how many are missing in [PRODUCT IMAGE] right above that, though.

(Also I'm just eyeballing it from mobile so I may be wrong about exact counts of characters)

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manquer 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unicode emojis aren’t ascii .

Long before Unicode points were assigned we were using emojis in text communication in email and sms.

you can always be quite expressive with ones like :) :D :-( or even ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - although not strictly ASCII.

	▲	Izkata 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those are called emoticons, not emoji. "Emoji" came about specifically to distinguish the single-character ones (unicode or proprietary) from what we did before.

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4b11b4 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While I agree a text representation is good for working with LLMs... most of the examples are mis-aligned?

Even the very first one (ASCII-Driven Development) which is just a list.

I guess this is a nitpick that could be disregarded as irrelevant since the basic structure is still communicated.