Diagramming tools

Operating Systems, Editors, and Tools
1

There are a few old discussions about diagramming tools. I’m going to merge/link them all in this topic so that they are in one place.

Here are a few more:

See also:

If anyone knows of other useful tools leave a comment below.

3

Here’s a nice intro to Graphviz.

A template for database diagrams with PlantUML

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4

svgbob is fun, GitHub - ivanceras/svgbob: Convert your ascii diagram scribbles into happy little SVG

lately I use Claude Code to create Github Wiki pages using mermaid diagrams.

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5

That reminds me that I sometimes put project documentation in a repo with mdBook and mdbook-mermaid. Then the LLMs can write documentation. The agents can also read the documentation later for reference.

mdbook init manual
cd manual
mdbook-mermaid install .
mdbook serve -p <port>
6

I create a lot of Rust CLI tools. I used to focus on creating custom MCP servers, but then Anthropic blogged about the wasted context for MCP tool descriptions, and recommended having AI coding agents discover via code, so I updated my CLIs to provide different help (-h for humans, and --help for AI coding agents) so that I tell the coding agent to use a CLI (in the path) with --help to understand what the tool does and its arguments.

Also, for each project I have the AI create (and later read) many markdown files (architecture, PRD, design, plan, and status). I also have tools that poplulate a new project with process.md and ai_agent_instructions.md. Also, since LLMs don’t yet absorb or learn daily, I created a learnings.md where I ask the AI to describe each bug and how to prevent that kind of bug. The CLAUDE.md or AGENT.md is updated to emphasize reading all the docs, following the process, and update and review learnings. It is not foolproof, and I often have to remind the AI to do this, but it does help.

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7

Thanks for the list of resources.

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