alt Hacker NewsYMMV, but the value I get from producing a diagram is derived from the thinking. Thinking about what I'm trying to draw leads to understanding about where my/my team's knowledge is poorer, what assumptions we're making, etc.
Replies
johongo • today at 5:57 PM
I don't remember who said it, but someone mentioned that mathematics papers don't read well because the models don't know which parts to emphasize and which parts to gloss over. I would imagine similar tendencies here.
sbarre • today at 6:00 PM
Yeah I tend to make my diagrams either as I go, as exploration, or after I'm done figuring things out as a summarizing artifact (and agents are great at using Mermaid to do that second one).
qudat • today at 6:36 PM
Yes I agree! Drawing helps me think.
I found a big part of the appeal with tools such as Excalidraw is that people are still more willing to engage with your content because they think that its made by hand.
Compare a piss-tinted LLM-generated diagram with 80 pipes, flows and generic names everywhere to a seemingly hand-drawn sketch.
I have had my Exaclidraw connected to an agent through their MCP and I have gotten way more attention/time/reads on both blogs and papers because of the illusion of being human-made/hand-drawne making it more palatable.