Code or diffusion? A field guide to programmatic image generation

A diagram is not a picture. It is a data structure that happens to be visible. Treat it as pixels and you pay pixel prices. $0.02 to $0.20 per diffusion render. No source file. No source-level way to fix a typo: you need another generation or an image-editing step. Most teams pay this by reflex, for things that were never really pictures: diagrams, charts, dashboards, labeled boxes. There is a second path. The LLM writes code. A renderer turns the code into the image without another model call…