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Yeah, the developer experience (DevEx) around diagrams is still really poor, despite some sterling efforts by folks behind Mermaid, PlantUML, D2, etc etc. I wa
by bloopernova 3y ago
Yeah, the developer experience (DevEx) around diagrams is still really poor, despite some sterling efforts by folks behind Mermaid, PlantUML, D2, etc etc.
I want something that will use (text based, tree-sitter diffable, and git stored) architecture diagrams as its source of truth. Then compare those diagrams with actual code, and give us meaningful/useful divergence metrics. And from the source of truth, apply style transforms to display in different ways. D2 can do something like that last bit, with its different layout engines.
It feels like we already have the information available: we have (terraform) code that produces infrastructure, and (nodejs) code that produces applications. So how can take that structural information and turn it into something useful? I kind of like the idea of a ML model that gives you some standard views of your diagrams, then asks you which bits are useful, and which bits you want to hide/discard from the final output. Going back and forth with that a bit would produce a JSON file that tells the transform engine what to display. I don't know if an LLM can be prompted to do something like that, but a model-assisted workflow might be useful.
I also want to be able to compare before and after architectural decisions. Or compare the infrastructure and application patterns against industry best practices. Plus being able to automatically spit out updated, accurate diagrams for leadership would be great.