Convert Mermaid Diagrams to Unicode Box Art
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-07-16
The author discovered xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs in the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent repository, a Rust-based terminal component for rendering Mermaid diagrams.\n\nThey subsequently ported this capability to the browser using WebAssembly and built a mini-tool via prompts in Claude Code for web. The final output is a web tool that converts Mermaid diagrams into Unicode box art.\n\nThis post serves as a practical log of "extracting reusable capabilities from open-source code and rapidly building functional tools," offering valuable insights for coding agent and dev tool developers.
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