[vunderba]

A similar thing happened when Google started really pushing generating flowcharts as a use-case with Nano Banana. A slick presentation can distract people from the only thing that really matters - the accuracy of the underlying data.

[Angostura]

As a slightly different tack, I’ve been using Copilot to generate flowcharts from some of the fiendishly complex (and badly written) standard operating procedures we have at work.

People find them quite easy to check - easier than the raw document. My angle with teams is use these to check your processes. If the flow is wrong it’s either because the LLM has screwed up, or because the policy is wrong/badly written. It’s usually the latter. It’s a good way to fix SOPs

[vunderba]

It’s interesting you mentioned that. One of the things I’ve started doing recently is throwing a large LLM such as codex-5.3 (highest level of reasoning) at some of the more complex systems we have to produce nicely formatted ASCII diagrams.

I still review each diagram afterward, but the great thing is that, unlike image-based diagrams, they remain fully text-readable and searchable. And you can even expose them as part of the knowledge base for the LLM to reference when needed going forward.

[Angostura]

Copilot outputs Mermaid diagram markup for me - so the graphs are editable and importable into diagraming packages

[vunderba]

Yeah I'm a big fan of mermaid as well. Extended ASCII works a bit better for me because depending on the text editor because I don't need a custom visualization tool.