"For AI agents". I understand why everything needs to be marketed in this way, but it's just ... an easy-to-generate language for expressing charts. That's impressive! That's useful.
This can’t be said enough. “Good for Agents” just means self-documenting, obvious ergonomics, save defaults, succinct (or controllable) output, programable interfaces, … all of which support human users too!
anything more than their own handpicked examples and you're better off using d3 or yfiles. layering, clustering, boundaries, rearranging are all basic needs for text to diagrams. None support it.
Both suck at being any good for rendering diagrams from readable structured text. There is a gap to be addressed.
yes and that led me to a more fundamental question : is it even possible for an easy way to do fine grained adjustments. The finer granularity brings complexity. that makes it unreadable (especially for the untrained) and hence set aside and forgotten. The other way is to narrow down and focus on a well defined subset of problems.
either way the number of people willing or compelled to learn it will be tiny. and it hence becomes a niche, perfect for a long-term side project but with no real return.
my conclusion was to stop looking and use D3 or custom code ( good looking charts for humans).
this project is trying to do the same, balance verbosity in text with granularity in the charts with a narrowish usecase : agent consumption.
Why can’t AIs generate for the “existing, mature ones?” Like the other commenter said, I’m not sure I get the “this is totally for AI” marketing. Why can’t AI use the existing ones and why can’t humans use this?
the design here has some constructs (i.e., semantic types) that AI can use better than human at generation time; and then the generated spec can be easy for user to edit since there is no need for hard-coded low-level parameters!
Thank you for summarizing it this way. All their flowery language (esp from OP) seems like long for "we figure out how the chart should look based on its data". From their page:
> Instead of requiring verbose low-level parameters such as scales, axes, spacing, and layout, the Flint compiler derives optimized chart settings from the data, semantic types, chart type, and encodings.
I work with someone who did a lot of work with this to improve our ability to generate awesome visualizations with little thinking. It's a very powerful language but needs guardrails and guidance, particularly if you want end users to be able to produce consistent and standardized visualizations without knowing anything about it.