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