Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming?

Cool. One thing I found odd was that on export there are two listed formats. "ASCII" and "ASCII extended" but as far as I can tell, the ASCII version is actually outputting UTF-8. It's hard to tell for sure though because the output is just text that you can cut and paste and so it's difficult to know what conversions the browser or OS might be doing behind the scenes. But when I paste it into a text editor on my mac, it's definitely UTF-8, not ASCII encoded.

Which is probably more useful anyway given that if it really outputted ASCII encoded line drawing characters, you'd end up with gibberish on a system that assumed UTF-8 encoding.

numpad0 · 2h ago

20 20 78 78 78 ... Looks ASCII to me, Firefox on Windows. Could be OS.

ilovetux · 2h ago

Disclaimer, I just pulled this quote from Google ai which probably took it from somewhere else, but I just wanted to provide a little context. ASCII encoded text is also valid utf8.

> The first 128 characters of Unicode, which are the same as the ASCII character set (characters 0-127), are encoded in UTF-8 using a single byte with the exact same binary value as their ASCII representation. This means that any file containing only ASCII characters is also a valid UTF-8 file

staplung · 1h ago

Yes, but the box drawing characters in "ASCII" are all above 127 so they don't encode the same way. So that last AI generated sentence is basically false (or really misleading): ASCII files that consist only of characters in the lower 127 will also be valid UTF-8. But ASCII files that use characters above 127 will not be valid UTF-8.

Now, technically, ASCII only concerns the lower 127 characters. There's no single standard definition as to what the upper half of the byte space represents in ASCII itself so technically it's true that all valid ASCII files are valid UTF-8. By the same logic however, the box drawing characters are not ASCII. They're actually part of something called code page 437, which maps those bit patterns to box drawing characters. With other code pages they map to something else, often non-Latin characters or ones with accents.

So, the name ASCII flow is misleading and the the output options are too. ;-) Basically, if the high bit is set in UTF-8 it indicates that more than one byte is needed to represent the code point.

ilovetux · 1h ago

Granted, all of that is true, but GP specifically differentiated between ASCII and ASCII Extended, then GP went on to say that after choosing the ASCII option and pasting the text in a text editor on Mac it was reported as UTF-8, which I was pointing out would be true because if the ASCII option is chosen as opposed to the ASCII Extended option then what he ends up with (ASCII) is valid UTF-8 as reported by the text editor.

em3rgent0rdr · 2h ago

Indeed, UTF-8 "was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded file using only those characters is identical to an ASCII file."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

johnisgood · 56m ago

There are lots of similar projects to this that made top HN the past week. Is there a list of it? I was not logged in and I lost history but the previous one I just saw earlier today was quite nice, too!

Edit: Oh apparently it was "Monodraw". There was yet another one besides that. I am all up for such tools. What was the name of the one that allowed you to specify the diagrams using some custom DSL which in turn would generate the diagrams themselves?

behnamoh · 1h ago

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

Aissen · 1h ago

It was on HN recently, the open source text-to-digram tool d2 just launch an ascii output mode: https://d2lang.com/blog/ascii/

behnamoh · 46m ago

This is really close to what I wanted, thanks!

nonethewiser · 1h ago

>I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

How would what it generates be any different than what you wrote?

inanutshellus · 1h ago

He doesn't want to click and drag with his mouse. Instead he wants an input box that lets him say "make a box [30] columns wide and [4] rows tall".

behnamoh · 48m ago

Yes, exactly! Either in natural language or some DSL.

PhilipRoman · 54m ago

graph-easy? It doesn't give you a lot of control though

MT4K · 17m ago

Doesn’t open in some regions because of Cloudflare.

NoSalt · 2h ago

Cool concept, but I couldn't get everything to work; namely the "Select & Move" on individual boxes or lines. The select area and move did work, though.

ctenb · 1h ago

It works for me, but differently than I first thought. You don't select and move line shapes as a whole, but only segments in a perpendicular direction

ChrisArchitect · 2h ago

Some previous discussions:

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30273299

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536253

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16051428

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7085133

iamunr · 1h ago

https://monodraw.helftone.com/

But now on web!

leohart · 11m ago

I think monodraw is way better and at a one time price of $10, it's really is a fantastic piece of software.