ASCII Diagrams - Retrogression for the Robots

There are a few areas where I have been adopting a simpler and less visually appealing method of working in order to produce assets which are easily ingested by LLMs to speed up my process workflow.

One of these is on visual diagramming.

I would have once built flow diagrams with lots of colors and PDFed them using a tool like Lucid Charts. I would produce entity-relationship diagrams, technical architectural documents and rough visual mock-ups of screens for developers using this.

Now I have gone all in on .txt files again.

My tool of choice is now Monodraw: https://monodraw.helftone.com/

This tool allows for boxes, arrows, dotted lines and charts and diagrams to easily be created point and click and all of them are rendered with a standard ASCII character palette.

I can build diagrams and drop them into documentation in-repo as markdown files and humans and robots alike can easily read and digest changes.

The cost in tokens to digest something like this is minimal and it also gets around limits when using free subscription tiers to OpenAI models for example by avoiding image uploads.