A mechanistically generated diagram, i.e. a program reading in something and then emitting a diagram, following a specific algorithm.
> a defined translation from one abstraction layer to another
A solution like the aforementioned cannot reliably present a view with a raised level of abstraction, as that necessitates either making unsound assumptions, or being provided with hints (which can be wrong or expire). Just like code (because they are code).
And so if this is indeed just a rote visualization like that, sticking to the same level of abstraction (thereby not encountering this issue), then they stipulate it is "almost certainly useless, just like they usually are".
I personally find this agreeable, but then I rarely find diagrams particularly illuminating in general, so...
Hi, author here. The app itself (Ilograph[0]) is fairly old; its first ShowHN was in 2019.
These particular yt-dlp diagrams were an experiment in getting meaningful sequence diagrams from a code repo using Claude. If you open the black tab on the left, you can see the source of the diagrams. Claude was able to generate most of this, albeit with a good amount of back-and-forth to get the details right, plus some manual tweaking in the end.
Kind of despised the way you didn't even let me see a preview of my own created graph without having to signup, and the signup prompt didn't show up until I fixed the mistakes in the YAML. So I pasted something (generated), spent some minutes fixing the mistakes, then get hit with a signup prompt, before being able to see the graph... Just be upfront with the signup requirement, don't let me edit anything, if you're gonna gate it like that.
> a defined translation from one abstraction layer to another
A solution like the aforementioned cannot reliably present a view with a raised level of abstraction, as that necessitates either making unsound assumptions, or being provided with hints (which can be wrong or expire). Just like code (because they are code).
And so if this is indeed just a rote visualization like that, sticking to the same level of abstraction (thereby not encountering this issue), then they stipulate it is "almost certainly useless, just like they usually are".
I personally find this agreeable, but then I rarely find diagrams particularly illuminating in general, so...
These particular yt-dlp diagrams were an experiment in getting meaningful sequence diagrams from a code repo using Claude. If you open the black tab on the left, you can see the source of the diagrams. Claude was able to generate most of this, albeit with a good amount of back-and-forth to get the details right, plus some manual tweaking in the end.
[0] https://www.ilograph.com