Ask the Model to Draw a Vietnamese Incense-Making Diagram, and It Hands You a Chunk of JavaScript

Ann Nguyen asked Grok 4.7 to draw a diagram of “how Vietnamese people make incense.” What the model delivered was playable: bamboo sticks are split, soaked in water, dyed, dried in the sun, and rolled into bundles; when rain comes, the incense is brought back under the eaves. It has a hand-drawn style, in three colors—blue, green, and yellow—with two people wearing conical hats busy from morning to night.

She added: no special skill needed, just plain JavaScript.

That sentence is the point of the whole tweet. Ayushman spelled it out in a reply: asking a model to draw is increasingly equivalent to asking it to write code. It doesn’t generate pixels; it generates a small program that can run in the browser.

You can open it in typingmind’s artifacts and run it: https://cloud.typingmind.com/artifacts/a-01m6b40rcmy915sapez8bxyae6. The animation is frame by frame, the scene changes have rhythm, and the characters don’t move much but their positions line up. An ordinary illustration model can’t give you this; what it gives you is shapes plus transform functions.

Another thread appeared in the same week. Kevin Ngo used poteto’s /statechart skill to draw a bubble tea shop; the model was Claude Opus 5.5, and the code is open source. What came out wasn’t an illustration but a state diagram: queuing, ordering, paying, making; when the pearls run out, it goes down another branch; picking up the wrong drink at pickup also counts as a path.

Some people in the comments fixated on the details. Ricardo said the branch for running out of pearls shows that whoever drew the diagram had really stood in that line. Sergio said that skipping the four-hour rule during peak hours is the most realistic bug in the whole shop.

These reactions point to the same thing: a state diagram isn’t decoration; it forces the model to think through every fork in the process. If it doesn’t, the diagram will have holes, and readers can spot them at a glance.

Back to incense making. This subject is well suited as a stress test; Ayushman’s point is that the steps are extremely specific, so you can immediately tell whether the model knows the order or is just making things up by feel. Splitting bamboo, soaking it in water, dyeing, drying, rolling incense, cutting into sections—if the order is wrong, the scene will fall apart.

As for whether Grok 4.7 is actually any good, some people in the replies didn’t believe it and specifically opened a membership to try it. Ann’s attitude is that the link is right there, and running it once is faster than arguing.

Looking back, the model wasn’t drawing this time; it was modeling. The good-looking diagram is a byproduct—what’s being generated is states, branches, and timelines. Next time you see a moving diagram, think about how many lines of code are running behind it.