Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

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• Hacker News
• https://github.com/scicloj/kindly

  but enterprise

  by ietcd
• It compiles into Echarts, but echarts already has a JSON co figuration spec
  by animal_spirits
• It's more like a simple high-level spec to make it easier. The idea is that you don't have to fill position / axes details just to make the chart work. The compiler has a bit of magic of using semantic types to optimize what parameters will be set in ECharts.

  In some composite chart examples, the good-looking echart spec is like 5x longer than the simple Flint one!

  by chenglong-hn
• Project page: https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/

  MCP setup: https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/mcp

  by chenglong-hn
• > requiring them to explicitly make visual decisions that are supposed to be handled by a good compiler

  Isnt graphviz there for the same reason?

  Edit: I see it is using JSON as the declaration language, I am OK with llms being "good at json" but a syntax also consumable by humans it is not!

  by theK
• In fact, Json as a common language for human in visualization has been around for a while! The benefit of declarative grammar is that users can effective manipulate specs through UI (drag and drop, clicks).

  Btw, Flint is intentionally designed to allow agent skip low-level params like scale, axe, zero, step size etc (which are extremely crucial for "GOOD-looking") and they are dynamically optimized by the compiler. So AI agents can have a easier time.

  by chenglong-hn
• The charts are very nice, and I think the visualisation layer for LLMs is a very interesting problem.

  I’ve been building https://smalldocs.org for this exact reason. It’s an office suite for AI agents - but my main use case is giving a cli based LLM the canvas to express itself - charts, mermaid diagrams, etc. I’ve extended it a bit further to be a format for all types of work so the agent can embed slides and spreadsheets in a document.

  Sample document: https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc

  Source: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

  by FailMore
• interesting how you don't discuss literally anything about the project actually posted and spam your thing. Not pointing you out, seen many other comments like this on HN but always felt a bit weird about them
  by altmanaltman
• > mermaid diagrams

  I'm terrible at diagrams, so I gave GPT very generic descriptions of one of our project, to convert in to that mermaid style, then for Lucid I pasted it in there, and had a visualization of what I needed. Worked out nicely.

  by giancarlostoro
• This is cool to see from a research team. A few weeks ago I was exploring a similar idea with ntcharts, where a user or LLM can specify a chart in a Golang or JSON object...

  and then that spec would be rendered either to a Bubble TUI via NTCharts or to HTML/SVG via ECharts. That Echarts HTML could be naturally served by a Golang http service.

  But Flint goes much deeper with semantic layers and settings optimizations. Perhaps a NTChart, or whatever terminal chart, could be a rendering target? I'll add it to the list to explore...

  https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/spec/spec/REA...

  by neomantra
• This is fun! We started thinking it would just be an engineering task in the beginning, but doing a solid intermediate language turned out to be a research project (the paper will be out soon).

  Also, I find NTChart very fun, maybe we should add NT chart to the list of compilation backend for Flint so it works in the library. Putting a reminder here: https://github.com/microsoft/flint-chart/issues/45

  by chenglong-hn