Martin Fowler

Creating a user interface that visualizes a real-world structure — like the Thirty Meter Telescope’s mirror — might seem like a task that demands deep knowledge of geometry, D3.js, and SVG graphics. But with a Large Language Model (LLM) like Claude or ChatGPT, you don’t need to know everything upfront.

This article documents a journey in building a complex, interactive UI with no prior experience in D3.js or UI development in general. The work was done as part of building a prototype for an operational user interface for the telescope’s primary mirror, designed to show real-time status of mirror segments. It highlights how LLMs help you “get on with it”, giving you a working prototype even when you’re unfamiliar with the underlying tech. More importantly, it shows how iterative prompting — refining your requests step-by-step — leads not only to the right code but also to a clearer understanding of

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