4 ms·
Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era
- kburman 3mo ago[deleted]
- teruakohatu 3mo agoLiterally the first backend they mention is Vega-Lite.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- refactor_master 3mo agoWhen does it get too abstract? What’s wrong with plotly? Or plotly express? How is yet another JSON spec era-anything?
- kristiandupont 3mo ago>When does it get too abstract? When the abstraction detracts more value than it provides. I think this is an interesting direction to explore. Plotly is fine. So is D3 and plenty of other solutions, but neither represent the ultimate pinnacle of charting.
- woah 3mo agoWhy is this "for the AI era"? Isn't it kind of not for the AI era since an LLM can create a gnarly python or js chart of whatever you want in seconds?
- croes 3mo agoNowadays you either create something with or for AI. Like you created you own framework for wen apps before. "For the AI era" is the necessary buzzword
- orbital-decay 3mo agoIt can write anything, but that's not a guarantee it can easily read and comprehend it later
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 3mo agoIt's cool...but is it needed? I'm thinking of Apache echarts and any of many other mature charting libraries. Kinda seems like reinventing the wheel; thing gets released, thing gets more and more new features bolted onto it, eventually someone offers another thing that's basically the original thing with some slightly different design and syntax opinions... Switch backends to use their native strengths: ECharts for hierarchical sunbursts, Plotly for statistical and analytical traces, or Excel for editable charts embedded in a workbook. Or just find a charting library that you like and actually get to know what it can do, vs mixing and matching presets from different libraries but never tweaking them.
- thepoet 3mo agoAn earlier larger discussion 22 days ago on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834924
- akst 3mo agoEven in the Era AI, GGPlot's API is still the best charting API. The name "Grammar of Graphics" isn't just marketing, they literally sought to write a god damn grammar to was capable of expressing all possible qualitative graphics. They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/0-387-28695-0 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/0-387-28695-0 I actually stumbled upon this book when I was trying to look up how draftsmen (with pens and pencils on paper) did qualitative graphics as I found they had a lot of charm as opposed to modern charting libraries. It's something I noticed when looking through a bunch of historical RBA (Reserve bank of Australia) annual reports, the 1960-1980 charts had a lot of character, but then you go into the early 2000s and its a stale chart from excel. Anyways ggplot doesn't really recapture the magic of those older charts, but it seems use quite a few of those as a baseline for how to communicate information. Like in figure 20.1 they talk about efforts to replicate older inforgraphics that showed Napoleon’s March on Russia, this graphic here (I think the example in the book is a bit nicer than the one in this blogpost IMO) https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2017/08/10/exploring-minards-1812-plot-with-ggplot2/ https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2017/08/10/exploring-minard... On top of the charts just look nicer than anything you could produce with pyplot (and any API built on top of it) as pyplot seems to be have some really limited raster based rendering or something and the text handling is incredibly limited, I've never had this issue in ggplot. I feel like most software engineers aren't exposed to because it exists in the R ecosystem which is more so data scientist, econometricians, statisticians and other quantitative data professions, but it definitely one of the nicer APIs and I wish more people in the node and python ecosystem copied their homework. I see vega's full name is something to do with grammars, but idk it's for the same reason.
- Culonavirus 3mo agoYeah this is not needed and every single day it is needed even less.
- shepherdjerred 3mo agoSo this is one interface that can render to multiple charting backends? If AI is writing the "Flint", why not just have it write the backend code instead? I'm not sure why I would want pluggable charting backends. I can see an argument for providing simpler APIs for LLMs, though, so that it can be more token efficient for example.
- awestroke 3mo agoDifferent charting backends support different kinds of charts. Being able to easily switch between "ECharts Sunburst" and "Vega-Lite faceted bar" - one of the examples on the project website - seems like a super useful ability.
- HawtAds 3mo agoInteresting, TanStack Charts was also released a couple days ago with a similar design. https://tanstack.com/charts/latest https://tanstack.com/charts/latest
- chrisweekly 3mo agoYeah I was going to share it too. I watched a yt video yesterday where Tanner talks about how (in contrast to trad component-based libs) it takes a very different approach to composition, letting D3 do the heavy lifting and using its visual grammar, and staying grounded in putting the data (not the component tree) first.
- HawtAds 3mo agoI wish they would provide an ECharts backend, it's probably one of the most performant and featureful charting libraries you can find.
- scary-size 3mo agoFair. How is this specific to the marketed AI integration? This could just be a unifying abstraction layer for a bunch of, in my opinion, verbose chart APIs. And then the LLM could just be the abstraction layer.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo agoThis is just json right? One issue with llms right now it's that if you give them a json specification, they're not always amazing at following it. I think it makes sense to have an agent tool that takes llm json, a file name and a spec path and only writes out the file if it conforms.
- mirashii 3mo ago> give them a json specification, they're not always amazing at following it Used correctly, this hasn't been true for a quite a while. Most inference engines have a form of grammar constrained decoding. See, for example: https://vllm.ai/blog/2025-01-14-struct-decode-intro https://vllm.ai/blog/2025-01-14-struct-decode-intro
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo agoI trust my setup a lot more than whatever this is.
- est 3mo agounfortunately JSON is doomed to fail in "the AI era" LLMs are surprisingly bad at generating JSON.
- kamikazeturtles 3mo agoWhy is that?
- afro88 3mo agoAre they in 2026? I haven't had an issue with json and LLMs in a long while
- cyanregiment 3mo agoJSON, CSS, JS config files… for me it tends to omit fields and produce unwanted or duplicate ones. But way less so in TS. Because the types/interfaces are there to guide it further. So everyone’s adding types everywhere: “Agent friendly” What would a CSS type system look like !
- lenkite 3mo agoI would love a CSS type system for humans. The language never stays in my brain for more than 2 weeks and then I have to re-learn it from scratch.
- cyanregiment 3mo agoSame, and I guess it already is (pretty strongly) typed but yeah > for humans And dare I say “agents” - it’d be nice to have very nuanced types
- steve_adams_86 3mo agoYou can use skills or harnesses to have them validate their json (using plain old JSON validation or schemas) and they seem to have a very high success rate with that gate in place. It's slightly more tokens, but it's reliable
- block_dagger 3mo agoDoes it do flowcharts and arch diagrams? Doesn’t seem like it.
- slicendice 3mo agoCan it respond to my several open github tickets?
- barryhennessy 3mo agoMaybe they’re not selling this well. Maybe they’re so close to the AI research that this seems like an obviously good idea. But there’s not one word of why this is good for LLMs, or how they tested/measured that. My gut would tell me that a new solution put up against all the vega lite specs it’s already be trained on would be a hard thing to win.
- yoz-y 3mo agoEvery time I needed to do charts at work I had a conundrum. Libraries are aplenty but basically only plotly does everything, but it’s not the prettiest. I’d much rather developers contributed new features into existing libraries.
- lenkite 3mo agoWhat does plotly do that other libraries don't ?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- williamcotton 3mo agoSo a stringly typed JSON-based DSL without a linter or LSP?
- zurfer 3mo agoIf it's made for LLMs, the spec should be yaml not json. Way more token efficient
- garethrowlands 3mo agoIt's really not that simple. Yaml can be more token efficient but not necessarily. And it's often not the biggest factor.
- hansmayer 3mo ago[dead]
- Imanari 3mo agoWhat is wrong with "please make plot XYZ in plotly?"
- xigoi 3mo agoA Microslop employee won’t get promoted for that.
- DespairTensor 3mo agoIf you're doing automated data visualization, "please make plot XYZ in plotly" needs a sandbox to execute the JS or Python code. With something like this you can avoid it, you just validate it and plot it. If the LLMs are better at generating Flint than Vega-Lite specs then I see how the project can be useful.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- data-ottawa 3mo agoI have tried using Flint vs asking the AI to generate a Vega lite spec directly, and in my opinion Flint was not as nice of a solution. Flint is fine for doing predetermined chat types, with very low customization. But I found using an agent or sub agent to create the Vega spec directly allowed for a lot more flexibility, and ultimately that means higher quality visualizations (stuff like adding points for min and max on a timeseries, or adding a callout marker for a date where some event happened). That being said, with Vega lite you have to validate your chart specs, provide specific guidance, and play whack a mole with Vega bugs/idiosyncrasies. So Flint is more reliable if you don’t want to dedicate a whole skill to making charts and want to get running quickly.
- Garlef 3mo agoidk ~ it's either a bit thin or i'd expect something more substantial "for the AI era" ... as the kids would say: "weak sauce" ... and it's just a tool to create charts not a "visualization language" you could probably vibeslop a pipeline from some ad-hoc DSL to excel or pandas or R and get a better integration with your business context
- boomskats 3mo agoThis needs a side-by-side config comparison with something like echarts config schema format. I really don't see the point. I'm 99% sure the verbosity required in the system prompt to teach non-M$ models this new ever-so-slightly-different-but-not-obviously-necessary chart def abstraction format, and the iterations required to get it right, will outweigh any supposed efficiency gains resulting from using it. Just stating the obvious.
- StilesCrisis 3mo agoFeels to me like a preexisting project that pivoted their marketing pitch to AI.
- fr2029 3mo ago[dead]
- Adsnetworksucce 3mo ago[flagged]
- simianparrot 3mo agoIf "AI" was actually as capable as its salesmen claim, why can't it just use whatever existing library is out there already?
- Alien1Being 3mo agoGive it a year and Microsoft will have abandoned it for some other shiny buzzword rich agentic slop ...
- cyanregiment 3mo agoWhat a waste of time over at Microsoft Research
- dankobgd 3mo ago"for the ai era" == slop era
- hncsiocp9x 3mo ago[dead]
- stared 3mo ago"A Visualization Language for the AI Era", as a tagline, sounds weird. I had the best success with popular and versatile packages like matplotlib and ggplot2 - even 1.5 ago (vide https://quesma.com/blog/which-chart-would-you-swipe-right/ https://quesma.com/blog/which-chart-would-you-swipe-right/). Now, frankly, my go-to visualization package is React, sometimes with a pinch of D3.js (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/tree-of-tree/ https://p.migdal.pl/tree-of-tree/).
- Hawzen 3mo agoMy conspiracy theory is that this was not related to AI in any capacity, but it was tacked on because ai The linked website has only two mentions of AI, and one of them is the title, the approach isn't AI-centric in any meaningful sense either
- myshapeprotocol 3mo ago[flagged]
- infecto 3mo agoWhat is the point of this. I already can get an llm to draw charts using plotly, matplotlib, echarts, etc all the time. There will be always a better way but what does this buy us?
- vaniskey 3mo agoWhy is this for the AI era"?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago02 Jul 2026 04:28:21 UTC Microsoft/Flint-Chart https://github.com/microsoft/flint-chart https://github.com/microsoft/flint-chart https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756577 [ok] 08 Jul 2026 17:46:12 UTC Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/ https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834924 [ok]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago2,1,2
- siliconc0w 3mo agoDSLs for AI doesn't really make sense- they were trained on existing graphics libraries and are pretty good at them. Maybe a long term play would be putting this out and creating a "graphics bench" to entice the labs to overfit on your DSL but that seems like a lot of work
- missmoss 3mo ago[dead]
- lvl155 3mo agoIf you’re going to use AI, why use charting libraries? Just build it off of D3. By the way, latest models still struggle with charts/diagrams even if you specify your design system.