Yeah, agree. This is the sort of thing you release to build brand awareness and either offer a hosted option as a bonus or integrate into a larger stack. It is not the product. Someone will just make a better OSS option if they don't do it themselves.
I get the want to define architectural relationships as a node & edge structure rather than just purely diagrams, which is an argument for D2 over Mermaid
I made a really big flowchart diagram of all of our services and how they interrelate by giving Claude Code the description of what I wanted starting at the entry point project and working its way through the entire system to the data ingestion point. I gave Claude my GitHub access token so it could look through or clone each repo it needed. I also had many of the projects already cloned in my workspace folder through years of working on the various projects.
Claude was able to determine the project, analyze the code, and infer the infrastructure. It worked through the projects as it went drawing a higher level diagram first. Then I iteratively asked for more detail around the sections I thought needed more detail.
This was just an experiment that I spent a few hours on. Months later I misplaced the mermaid markdown file so I asked Claude to reproduce the mermaid markdown from the png image so I could have it add more detail around another section that looked incorrect because it encapsulated the database and worker for one of the systems in a single box. The detail made the diagram in that area much more clear.
To me it is very good at writing/reading/reverse engineering mermaid diagrams.
Claude tends to default to and do best with first making ASCII diagrams in markdown files, which you can then ask it to translate into Mermaid if appropriate.
Prompts like, "Please write a comprehensive report on _____ to work with _____. Include a holistic report on architecture and meaning and purpose of all involved systems. Describe the why and how of the changes in depth and include a full glossary of terms and systems.
Write as a new .md in docs when you are sure there are no major gaps in your understanding. Include a report on the plan to _____."
Will be the rough shape you want to get it to dig through all the relevant code and make relevant architectural diagrams. Guide more or less towards specifics as appropriate. This has worked well since Opus 4.5.
Zindex is a stateful diagram runtime for agents. Agents create diagrams by sending structured operations through the Diagram Scene Protocol (DSP) - the platform validates, normalizes, and renders durable scene state rather than one-shot output.
> Production-grade 17 operation types. 40+ semantic validation rules. Auth, rate limiting, PostgreSQL storage.
Man where in the LLM training data did the “production ready “ come from? That whole list screams AI. Humans want social proof, not a list.
The whole “Diagram Scene Protocol (DSP)” is pretty much like how every diagram library ever models graphs’ nodes and edges.
“describe what exists, not how to draw it”
really? please, someone tell graphviz about this, they should use it! /s
A diagramming solution that exactly controls how to draw it would the only thing I would be interested in seeing as an advance here.
If it doesn't provide controllable layout then I might just as well generate Mermaid or DOT, which are both produced perfectly fine by LLMs.
I tried to find them on GitHub. Doesn't seem to be FOSS/OSS either.
Does address a real use-case - might be great as a library or a lightweight alternative to Mermaid.
As SaaS it's a very hard sell.
Yeah, agree. This is the sort of thing you release to build brand awareness and either offer a hosted option as a bonus or integrate into a larger stack. It is not the product. Someone will just make a better OSS option if they don't do it themselves.
I just use D2 for this.
You have to include screenshots on a landing page for a diagramming system
I get the want to define architectural relationships as a node & edge structure rather than just purely diagrams, which is an argument for D2 over Mermaid
but why not just use https://github.com/jsongraph?
I’ve found that Claude can make decent mermaid diagrams pretty reliably. Not sure I quite understand what problem Zindex solves
> I’ve found that Claude can make decent mermaid diagrams pretty reliably.
When doing this, do you give it a codebase and ask for a diagram, or is it more of an iterative back-and-forth where you describe the system to it.
I made a really big flowchart diagram of all of our services and how they interrelate by giving Claude Code the description of what I wanted starting at the entry point project and working its way through the entire system to the data ingestion point. I gave Claude my GitHub access token so it could look through or clone each repo it needed. I also had many of the projects already cloned in my workspace folder through years of working on the various projects.
Claude was able to determine the project, analyze the code, and infer the infrastructure. It worked through the projects as it went drawing a higher level diagram first. Then I iteratively asked for more detail around the sections I thought needed more detail.
This was just an experiment that I spent a few hours on. Months later I misplaced the mermaid markdown file so I asked Claude to reproduce the mermaid markdown from the png image so I could have it add more detail around another section that looked incorrect because it encapsulated the database and worker for one of the systems in a single box. The detail made the diagram in that area much more clear.
To me it is very good at writing/reading/reverse engineering mermaid diagrams.
Claude tends to default to and do best with first making ASCII diagrams in markdown files, which you can then ask it to translate into Mermaid if appropriate.
Prompts like, "Please write a comprehensive report on _____ to work with _____. Include a holistic report on architecture and meaning and purpose of all involved systems. Describe the why and how of the changes in depth and include a full glossary of terms and systems. Write as a new .md in docs when you are sure there are no major gaps in your understanding. Include a report on the plan to _____."
Will be the rough shape you want to get it to dig through all the relevant code and make relevant architectural diagrams. Guide more or less towards specifics as appropriate. This has worked well since Opus 4.5.
Gotcha. So this is more for diagrams of new systems than existing ones. Our maybe a blend of new and old.
You could have it propose a spec or review a proposed spec to also get diagrams in a similar manner.
Zindex is a stateful diagram runtime for agents. Agents create diagrams by sending structured operations through the Diagram Scene Protocol (DSP) - the platform validates, normalizes, and renders durable scene state rather than one-shot output.
bad choice of name..
how does Zindex compares to Mermaid?