Comment by monkeydust | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeydust | Hacker News Reader

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I quite like PlantUML, even for add a simple diagram to an email discussion which has become to long.

My colleagues however like the idea but don't want to learn the syntax.

So I build a simple add-on to our internal mail system that, when invoked, scrapes the email and runs it against a fine tuned Llama 3.1 8b model which then generates a PlantUML diagram from natural language.

If the input isn't of an appropriate nature to be converted to a diagram or vague it will not do this.

What I have found is that now at least 50% of the team have used this feature once since go-live.

In many cases not all though, the immediately returned image is not 100% correct but there is a nice integrated way to edit and render which is now causing many to get familiar with the syntax whereas before they couldn't be bothered.

Overall it's been a nice, relatively cheap way to get GenAI to actually help us at work.

Just an FYI if you don’t know already: the free/public version of PlantUML makes the diagrams available to everyone able to enumerate the URLs.

For that reason, we use a self-hosted instance at work to retain privacy.

That sounds interesting, what kind of diagram are you generating from the email chain?

I use Github Copilot with PlantUML. I use PlantUML comments to describe what I want the diagram components to show and then the syntax is written for me. I can then edit it pretty easily and iteratively.

Do you have a sample you could share?

I’m having trouble visualising how an email could be represented as a diagram.

Not really for obvious reasons but I can try to explain.

So like many other orgs we use email heavily to get stuff done.

Like many orgs we have numerous teams that are required to co-ordinate together to get this stuff done.

A lot of the time there is some sequencing to the actions that needs to happen by these teams in a certain way to ensure we get this stuff done properly if at all.

So many emails could be interpreted like workflows ... A needs to validate with B then provide to C who then has to get confirmation from D.

There are more emails than I thought where something like PlantUML can help peoples understanding of the situation and also surface up potential areas of disagreement or misalignment quicker and also sometimes emails get so long that new entrants to the chain (via cc) would benefit from a quick visual summary.

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