So you can draw layouts like this and prompt Claude or Gemini with them, and get back working versions, which to me is space alien technology.

I've had it on a number of projects now where high quality assets were pushed into early builds causing execs eyes to light up as they feel like they're seeing a near final product, blind to the issues and under developed systems below. This can start projects off on bad footing because expectations can quickly become skewed and focus can go to the wrong places.

At one studio there was a running joke about trees swaying because someone had decorated an outdoor level with simulated trees. During an early test the execs got so distracted by how much they swayed and if it was too much or too little that they completely ignored the gameplay and content that was supposed to be under review. This issue repeated itself a number of times to the point where meetings would begin with someone declaring "We are not here to review the trees, ignore the trees!"

I've brought this issue up more recently with the advent of AI, which with things like Sora, the act of creating video clips can be stitched together can look like subjectively exciting movie trailers. This now has people declaring that AI movies are around the corner. To me this looks like the similar level of excitement as seeing the trees sway. An AI trailer looks much closer to a shipping product than it should be because the underlying challenges are far from solved; nothing is said about the script, pacing, character development, story etc...

I’m not affiliated, but to clean them up you can use something like ascii-guard (https://github.com/fxstein/ascii-guard) which is a linter that will clean it up. Beats doing it by hand after multiple attempts telling AI to do it and repeatedly fail.

I won't speculate on whether the post is AI-written or whether the author has adopted quirks from LLM outputs into their own way of writing because it doesn't really matter. Something about this "feeling" in the writing causes me discomfort, and I don't even really know why. It's almost like a tightness in my jaw or a slight ache in my molars.

Every time I read something like, "Not as an aesthetic choice. Not as nostalgia. *But as a thinking tool*" in an article I had until then taken on faith was produced in the voice of a human being feels like a let down. Maybe it's just the sense that I believed I was connecting with another person, albeit indirectly, and then I feel the loss of that. But that's not entirely convincing, because I genuinely found the points this article was making interesting, and no doubt they came originally from the author's mind.

Since this is happening more and more, I'd be interested to hear what others' experiences with encountering LLM-seeming blog posts (especially of inherently interesting underlying content) has been like.

- 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.

On my screen (Chrome on Windows on 1080p screen), it's in a scrollable box filling the middle half of the width of the screen. Some of the screens are set to display so many rows in the viewport, I have to scroll down several screenfuls to get to the horizontal scrollbar to view the right hand half, and then I can't see all the important stuff at the top right.

Secondly, mixing in emojis makes the font non-proportional so most of the screens don't line up properly. This isn't ASCII driven development, it's not even iso8859-1 driven development.

You might believe that TUI is neutral, but it really isn't - there's a bajillion of different ways to make a TUI / CLI.

Designers have learned figma and it's the de facto tool for them; doing something else is risky for them.

Product leaders want high fidelity. They love the AI tools that let them produce high fidelity prototypes.

Some (but not all) engineers prefer it because it means less decision making for them.

  +--------+
  |        |
  | ASCII! |
   |       |
  +--------+

I'll draw simple UI prototypes then rearrange and/or document. I can also easily share it with a colleague to comment or modify.

Here's one:

https://asciiflow.com/#/share/eJztXE1v2zYY%2FivvNAxwsDRBlrTA...)

claude(1) with Opus 4.5 seems to be able to take the examples in that article, and handle things like "collapse the sidebar" or "show me what it looks like with an open modal" or "swap the order of the second and third rows". I remember not long ago you'd get back UI mojibake if you asked for this.

Goes to show you really can't rest on your laurels for longer than 3 months with these tools.

None are mentioned. E.g I made https://cascii.app for exactly this purpose.

The examples are using non-ASCII characters. They also don’t render with a consistent grid on all (any?) browsers.

Maybe they meant plain-text-driven development?

In my web browser, on your website: broken. None of the things align and it looks really bad.

In this particular case, if the facts about how many years ago various products came out are wrong, it doesn't matter since I'm never going to be relying on that fact anyway. The fact that what the author is proposing isn't ASCII, it's UTF-8-encoded Unicode (emojis aren't ASCII) doesn't matter (and I rather suspect that this particular factual error would have been present even if he had written the text entirely by hand with no LLM input), because again, I'm not going to be relying on that fact for anything. The idea he presents is interesting, and is obviously possible.

So I care less about the "voice" of an article, but a LOT about its accuracy.

And if I'm wrong: so be it. I'm comfortable living dangerously.

(Reading it again, I probably should have noticed by "But here’s the thing: AI-generated UIs are high-fidelity by default", a couple of sentences previously. And in fact, there's "Deliberately sketchy. Intentionally low-fidelity. The comic-sans-looking wireframes were a feature, not a bug" in the very first paragraph - god, I'm so stupid! Still, each time I get this wrong, I'm that bit more likely to spot it in future.)

I think we do develop "antibodies" against this kind of thing, like listicles, clickbait, and random links that rickroll you. It's the same reason the article isn't titled, "5 examples of ASCII-Driven Development. You'll never guess #2!"

Every article is a little mentor, and the thing with mentors and teachers is you have to trust them blindly, suspend disbelief, etc. But the AI voice also triggers the part of the brain designed to spot scams.