AI-generated ASCII diagrams

I like AI-generated ASCII diagrams. Because nobody would ask AI to generate ASCII diagrams, and so, it’s congruous. I like incongruity [1]. Aside from the incongruity of using a gazillion-parameter neural network to make 1970’s style ASCII art, ASCII diagrams have some uses. They’re absolutely tiny compared to image files. But more importantly they can be inserted into plain text files, such as source code or markdown. A diagram embedded directly into a source file cannot become separated from the code. ASCII diagrams are tedious to create, though there are tools to mitigate the tedium. But if an AI can generate the diagram, the tedium goes away. I was curious how well Claude could create ASCII diagrams, so I tried a few examples. I hope these render well in whatever format you’re reading this post. They look fine for me previewing the post in a browser. I expect they might not turn out so well in an RSS reader. I asked it to reproduce the graphs from my recently post on the graph…