Posted by mlysk 13 hours ago
For a presentation or project documentation artifacts, I can then go thru my sketches and pull bigger pictures together easily. I applied Fowler's "sketch" principle in my own tool ormle.com
It’s a lot of work, as starting over is often easier than reviews and edits. Usually the diagrams are slightly out of date, but good enough to satisfy whoever is looking at it.
I wish I had a better solution. Now I’m wondering I could write something that walks the code for me.
That way, the diagram source and
Do use diagrams to explain an abstraction, and attach a word to it. Don't use diagrams to represent the exact state of a system.
[1]: https://darshanmakwana412.github.io/2026/03/a-system-of-jour...
Now it reads like an ad for some extension to a program I've never heard about.
It has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly.
The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.
Excalidraw is excellent for low-friction sketches.
A self-hosted version with storage (multiplayer) plus any Claude access would be a killer setup for team planning etc and let us drop Miro.
TLDraw: https://www.tldraw.com/
Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/
TikzMaker: https://tikzmaker.com/
The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.
I'm a huge fan of anything related to code that can I check into git, track its evolution and the thinking that went behind it. Why was Kubernetes chosen? Why was NATs chosen? Why are the topics named the way they are?
I am a huge fan of mermaid diagrams because it lets me check in my diagrams into git. I am a huge fan of mermaid diagrams because my code can generate diagrams that I (or they) can check into git - and this was before AI.
Now that AI can generate mermaid diagrams, people look at my Git repos and go "oh, you use AI a lot!" - then I point to my git history and they see it's from 2018.
I'm really happy that mermaid and related tools like Excalidraw are taking off - we have another chance at documentation being automated, uptodate and "fresh".