I’m hearing two things: 1. You want to build these diagrams faster and perhaps semi-automatically instead of dragging around boxes and lines. 2. You want them

I’m hearing two things: 1. You want to build these diagrams faster and perhaps semi-automatically instead of dragging around boxes and lines. 2. You want them to look better and not so perfunctory. To communicate better. There is kind of an oddball option here which I fell in love with. There’s a tool called Monodraw which is magic for making old school ASCII art diagrams. It’s surprisingly very visually compelling, easy to update and it’s just text so it can be embedddd in source code comments (no PDFs). The best reason you might consider this over a “big” IDE-type solution is that ultimately good cogent communication requires making choices about what to highlight. An exhaustive auto generated architecture diagram in the same generic style of everything else can make one’s eyes glaze over. When you choose what to show and emphasize you can tell a better “story”. Yes you have to keep the diagram up to date with major changes, but that’s not a problem if you lower the cost of updating and raise the visibility of the diagram by putting it in code. They even have a CLI now so you can export it in your build process.