Paper-Grade Figures, Drawn by an Agent: figures4papers

I've actually needed to draw decent-looking infographics myself. I wrote a lot of "recipe" prompts for AI to do it, and I even run a related SaaS site.

Then, a few days ago while browsing GitHub, I came across a really nice repo. It's full of scripts — and a skill — for drawing publication-grade figures. It's developed and maintained by a Chinese student studying overseas, and it's called figures4papers.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/ChenLiu-1996/figures4papers

I'd known another good skill before this one, called vivid-figures-skill.

Using figures4papers is dead simple. You don't even need to download anything — just send the repo link to your agent and tell it to go make the figure.

It's genuinely useful — real research productivity. And honestly it's nicer than the vivid one, at least in terms of aesthetics.

Back in the pre-AI era, the illustrations in a paper cost a lot of money if you hired a professional to make them, and a huge amount of effort if you did them yourself (and in the end you'd usually hire someone anyway — because you can copy a figure's layout, but good taste is much harder to copy).

Written by Terry, who also runs Airgrix, an airsoft gear store at https://airgrix.com.