Mermaid

“it's obviously much less time consuming to use a markup language to illustrate a network”

“it is very heavy for this purpose (needs an entire chromium instance for the rendering)”

“It still boggles my mind that mermaid's devs think you need an entire freakin' browser to render an SVG.”

“Virtually every diagram it makes that's over 6 nodes becomes a spaghetti mess”

“The LLMs are also pretty good at generating Mermaid charts and tracing execution flows, which is a great way to understand code.”

“yes, mermaid is fine; but often looks bad - esp when visualizing large diagrams”

“I had to do a lot of hacking/abuse of Mermaid to get it to do what I wanted”

“hand-tuning the layout of Mermaid, having to try alternative engines or parameters, is not what I want”

“a built-in alternate layout called `elk` that I find does a much cleaner job on complex flowcharts”

“It also renders on GitHub in markdown files with ```mermaid``` code blocks so it's super useful for adding architecture diagrams”

“drawing a diagram often saves you >60 minutes of discussion and potentially multiple meetings”

“There's multiple tools that generate architecture diagrams from text/code (Mermaid, LikeC4...)”

“having LLMs work with mermaid diagrams makes describing and modifying circuits less annoying”

“A lot of diagrams end up looking a bit rough, especially with arrow routing and layout”

“how often are people posting raw mermaid diagrams in comments here?… I've never seen one”

“Mermaid is awesome, since it has broad support, can be committed to repos, and can be created and edited very easily by LLMs.”

“I love mermaid because I'm a huge fan of anything related to code that can I check into git”

“I make heavy use of Mermaid as I find it easier to make small changes”

“Then the mermaid code can live next to the document source, and I need not search for the original diagram file to edit and export.”

“I went a different route using diagram-as-code with Mermaid instead of manual drawing.”

“I am a huge fan of mermaid diagrams because it lets me check in my diagrams into git.”

“As imperfect as they are, they mean you can insist the diagrams are updated in the same commit”

“A similar win I've found is documentating process flows with mermaid diagrams (.mmd).”

“Great for summarizing a multi-step process and quick to render with simple tools.”

“These have hard ceilings and there’s only so much you can work around the model”

“Mermaid is useful because it's text that can be checked in and versioned as usual.”

“An LLM driving mermaid with text tokens will produce infinitely more accurate diagrams than something operating in raster space.”

“Mermaid diagrams automatically render on Markdown and IDE chat windows as in VSCode or Cursor. So you get the best of both worlds”

“Mermaid diagrams are even better because you don't waste characters on the visual representation but rather the relationships between them.”

“this gives you the best of both worlds: a visual representation that is still text-based and searchable”

“Mermaid isn’t accessible by default either, but there’s current work in that direction”

“Mermaid couldn't render subgraphs in a different direction than the overall graph.”

“I've been having great success with LLMs generating Mermaid diagrams and flowcharts from a repo.”

“Wish there was something like Mermaid for typical AWS Architecture diagrams.”

“which are just code that you can render using the mermaid diagram website”

“A better way is to auto-generate e.g., class diagrams using PlantUML or Mermaid.”

“it changed how I could communicate and iterate on flows and higher-level designs”

“Mermaid is ubiquitous, and used extensively in virtually everywhere in the internet.”

“you may decide architecture diagrams are in Mermaid but that is by no means a stanfard”

“mermaid has much better support everywhere, including gitlab and github”