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Comment by sysguest | Hacker News Reader

well that holds IF svgmaxxing is 100% "code-writing-maxxing"

...which.. hmm I dunno if they are same or not

No, the point is that a general-ish ability to draw good SVGs is a useful ability in itself. People need SVGs for all sorts of purposes, and if AI can generate one for them, that's mostly useful (discussions about art and employment etc notwithstanding).

That said, I think this would correlate relatively little with general programming ability. They're not unrelated, of course, but being able to generate code that paints an accurate + esthetically pleasing image is quite different from generating code that achieves a non-spatial goal.

If people need to generate good-ish SVG why not simply use a specialized model for a much better result and for far cheaper and quicker?

Why do LLMs need to be able to do this as well, but worse, slower and more expensive?

Agree directionally - even back in sonnet 3.5 days, I was helping some friends by showing them how to create intermediate representations for SVG building blocks mapping to parametrizable functions that can be used to make interactive SVG-rendered visualizations for various medical needs.

Yeah, if you want to generate an aesthetically pleasing SVG, you'd be better off asking a pixel-based image-generation model for "vector art" and then deconstructing it into an equivalent SVG with something like LayerPeeler. https://layerpeeler.github.io/

For example I do SVG diagrams to explain architecture and specific data flows in a multi-tier app.

LLMs do a great job because they understand both code and SVGs well.

Edit:

An example for a synth I'm buulding: https://imgur.com/a/U694Ek7

The irony of having to post it as a PNG isn't lost on me...

This is not a strong use case. I could have made this in Microsoft word when I was 13 years old.

Why on earth would you let an LLM do this when it would take you 10 min to do this in Figma or Inkscape or even just Word

Because it reads the code and generates this in a single pass in 5 minutes.

I haven't read the code.

Why would I do it in a slower, more difficult way for something that's going to be outdated in 2 hours?

I'd be very impressed by anyone who can produce that in Figma or Word in ten minutes.

These are rectangles with some fill and strokes, textboxes lines and arrows. If the text has already been written, and the author has a clear idea of the flow all it takes are some a dozen or so points and click, and setting a couple of fills, then copy pastes, and finally some resizes, selects and moves.

This design is trivial. I admit it would be hard to achieve in Word (or at least for me because I don’t know how to make a diagram in Word any more) but Figma and Inkascape are made to do these things, and have optimized UI for that (personally I would have just used mermaid though).

I think you may have lost your faith in human capabilities just a little bit if you think drawing stuff like this takes any time or effort at all. Compared to designing and architecturing the system, drawing the diagram is trivial. Now I know that my parent did neither but it seems like they vibe-coded the whole thing. I’m sure they will end up with a fun little toy from the whole endeavor they can play with for 2 weeks before abandoning. Maybe the author will even feel bad about the carbon footprint of this whole exercise and buy some carbon offsets to make up for it.

> I’m sure they will end up with a fun little toy from the whole endeavor they can play with for 2 weeks before abandoning.

That's exactly the idea - except it's more like 2 hours before I prototype the next version.

> Maybe the author will even feel bad about the carbon footprint of this whole exercise and buy some carbon offsets to make up for it.

The passive aggressiveness of this is perfectly weighted and admirably phrased.

I am glad you get to have fun while people you will never meet and live in Sweden or Virginia have to suffer higher electricity prices. But we all get to enjoy the warmer climate together. But at least you can enjoy your self having the plagiarizer build you a single use toy that only took the carbon footprint of entire nations to create.

AI consumed around 0.5% of the world’s electricity in 2025[1]

Where I'm from data centers help the renewable mix by subsidizing transmission from other geographic zones. I'm actually improving the environment by using it.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...

I don't see why that's true. LLMs don't have to only be good at code-writing.

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