Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

Posted by vinhnx 18 hours ago

Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era(microsoft.github.io)

235 points | 65 comments

akst 15 hours ago|

Even 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

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-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.

williamcotton 14 hours ago||

> They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API)

Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics inspired ggplot. The textbook doesn’t even mention ggplot.

Shameless plug for my own GoG inspired DSL, Algraf:

https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf/demos

There’s a Minard plot in the demos!

akst 9 hours ago|||

Oh… I assumed it was a further expansion of the ideas that with into ggplot as they all look like ggplot charts and ideas were identical

I wish I could edit my original comment to add this correction.

__jochen__ 9 hours ago|||

nice, but did you expect it to not work on Safari (WASM fails)?

williamcotton 8 hours ago||

Safari is my default browser and it seems to be working just fine!

abirch 3 hours ago|||

Have you checked out plotnine?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/main/p... it's made by the same people behind ggplot. Hadley Wickham worked for RStudio which also created plotnine.

plotnine is currently sponsored by Posit where Hadley works.

jiehong 14 hours ago|||

To be fair, the Vega-lite backend is json mostly based on GG ideas.

In this vein, I think I prefer ggsql that made it to HN recently [0].

[0]: https://ggsql.org/

nylonstrung 8 hours ago|||

Yeah Grammar of Graphics semantics are already very ideal for both humans and agents alike. Ggsql is a recent project that implements it as SQL user defined functions which is even more agent friendly

I dont see what this brings to the table

WillAdams 9 hours ago|||

Well, for that hand-drawn charm if you're willing to use METAPOST there is:

https://github.com/jemmybutton/fiziko

porker 13 hours ago|||

How would you quantify the magic of these older charts? What is it that makes them have charm and character?

akst 9 hours ago|||

I made this a while back never finished it, but it’s a slide show of the different styles of graphics the RBA used over time

https://x.com/Angus_KST/status/2057757395196293262/video/1?s...

It’s incomplete but it show cases some of what I mean. There’s just a lot more charm in these earlier graphics. I’m fairly certain they had to consider how the different colours of ink bleed on one another.

Like take 1978 for example, this might be some kind of highlighter ink, and when the colours over lap the grid they interact in ways most overlapping geometry don’t in charting libraries (but in CSS you can get a similar effect with mix-blend-mode: multiply)

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/annual-reports/rba/1978/...

If you go to page 159 of the most recent RBA report, you’ll see otherwise clean clear charts that do a good job of communicating the relevant information (perhaps that’s all there should do from such an institution), but it’s admittedly soulless compared to the charts from previous decades

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/annual-reports/rba/2025/...

zem 11 hours ago|||

not the parent, but one thing i find charming is that a lot of them have a really good feel for line weight and inking style, and vary it interestingly in various parts of the plot. computer generated charts tend to have a much more uniform line weight.

nialse 14 hours ago||

Note that if you are affiliated with a University you probably can download a pdf of the book in the link for free.

akst 14 hours ago||

Yeah that's how I got a copy, found it on my unis digital library.

data-ottawa 11 hours ago||

I 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.

shepherdjerred 15 hours ago||

So 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 13 hours ago|

Different 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.

scary-size 11 hours ago|||

Fair. 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.

HawtAds 13 hours ago|||

Interesting, TanStack Charts was also released a couple days ago with a similar design.

https://tanstack.com/charts/latest

chrisweekly 7 hours ago||

Yeah 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 5 hours ago||

I wish they would provide an ECharts backend, it's probably one of the most performant and featureful charting libraries you can find.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5 hours ago||

02 Jul 2026 04:28:21 UTC

Microsoft/Flint-Chart

https://github.com/microsoft/flint-chart

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834924

[ok]

siliconc0w 4 hours ago||

DSLs 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

Imanari 13 hours ago||

What is wrong with "please make plot XYZ in plotly?"

DespairTensor 4 hours ago||

If 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.

xigoi 10 hours ago||

A Microslop employee won’t get promoted for that.

thepoet 15 hours ago||

An earlier larger discussion 22 days ago on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834924

refactor_master 16 hours ago||

When does it get too abstract? What’s wrong with plotly? Or plotly express? How is yet another JSON spec era-anything?

anigbrowl 16 hours ago|

It'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.

More comments...