January 10, 2026
Box it before you bot it
ASCII-Driven Development
Design by keyboard: ugly boxes, fast ideas, and comment chaos
TLDR: A designer proposes using plain text boxes to plan apps, avoiding flashy AI-made screens that distract from structure. Commenters loved the focus boost, argued about the “ASCII vs Unicode” name, and noted AI now edits these text layouts—making early design faster and less petty.
Designer Carlos Chinchilla dropped a holiday bomb with ASCII-Driven Development, arguing that today’s AI-made interfaces arrive too polished and drag teams into fussing over fonts and shadows instead of fixing the flow. His solution? Draw your app as plain text boxes and lines—no colors, no gradients, just structure. The goal is speed and focus, something you can paste anywhere and tweak in seconds, like early sketchy wireframes before tools like Figma turned prototypes into production-ready art. And yes, the author promises it plays nicely with AI as a thinking partner.
The comments went full soap opera. One camp cheered, with folks like damnitbuilds saying ASCII stops "color wars" and keeps meetings about what buttons do, not how they look. Then the naming police showed up: mixmastamyk snapped, “this is definitely Unicode not ASCII,” turning the thread into a nerdy cage match over characters vs the idea. Meanwhile, tptacek flexed that AI “agents” can drive terminal tools to check text-only layouts—translation: bots can vet the boxes. And ucarion added a twist: modern AI can now edit this text art on command, which shocked anyone who remembered early AI scrambling diagrams. The author (_hfqa) hopped in to clarify the mission—lock the hierarchy first, beautify later. Cue memes about "Figma detox" and "ASCII therapy" as the crowd split between keyboard doodlers, terminal wizards, and semantics sticklers. Drama served hot.
Key Points
- •The article traces the evolution from low-fidelity wireframing tools to high-fidelity collaborative design platforms and AI code generators.
- •AI-generated UIs are high-fidelity by default, causing teams to focus on aesthetics before validating structure.
- •Prototyping increasingly resembles production design, which can slow exploration and shift reviews into design critiques.
- •The author proposes ASCII-Driven Development: using ASCII characters to prototype UIs as a low-fidelity thinking tool.
- •Suggested workflow: describe UI, generate and iterate ASCII layouts and states, then feed into AI code tools (v0/Lovable/Bolt) and finalize visuals last.