Yeah, agree. This is the sort of thing you release to build brand awareness and either offer a hosted option as a bonus or integrate into a larger stack. It is not the product. Someone will just make a better OSS option if they don't do it themselves.
Claude tends to default to and do best with first making ASCII diagrams in markdown files, which you can then ask it to translate into Mermaid if appropriate.
Prompts like, "Please write a comprehensive report on _____ to work with _____. Include a holistic report on architecture and meaning and purpose of all involved systems. Describe the why and how of the changes in depth and include a full glossary of terms and systems.
Write as a new .md in docs when you are sure there are no major gaps in your understanding. Include a report on the plan to _____."
Will be the rough shape you want to get it to dig through all the relevant code and make relevant architectural diagrams. Guide more or less towards specifics as appropriate. This has worked well since Opus 4.5.
Zindex is a stateful diagram runtime for agents. Agents create diagrams by sending structured operations through the Diagram Scene Protocol (DSP) - the platform validates, normalizes, and renders durable scene state rather than one-shot output.
I tried to find them on GitHub. Doesn't seem to be FOSS/OSS either.
Does address a real use-case - might be great as a library or a lightweight alternative to Mermaid.
As SaaS it's a very hard sell.
Yeah, agree. This is the sort of thing you release to build brand awareness and either offer a hosted option as a bonus or integrate into a larger stack. It is not the product. Someone will just make a better OSS option if they don't do it themselves.
I’ve found that Claude can make decent mermaid diagrams pretty reliably. Not sure I quite understand what problem Zindex solves
> I’ve found that Claude can make decent mermaid diagrams pretty reliably.
When doing this, do you give it a codebase and ask for a diagram, or is it more of an iterative back-and-forth where you describe the system to it.
Claude tends to default to and do best with first making ASCII diagrams in markdown files, which you can then ask it to translate into Mermaid if appropriate.
Prompts like, "Please write a comprehensive report on _____ to work with _____. Include a holistic report on architecture and meaning and purpose of all involved systems. Describe the why and how of the changes in depth and include a full glossary of terms and systems. Write as a new .md in docs when you are sure there are no major gaps in your understanding. Include a report on the plan to _____."
Will be the rough shape you want to get it to dig through all the relevant code and make relevant architectural diagrams. Guide more or less towards specifics as appropriate. This has worked well since Opus 4.5.
Gotcha. So this is more for diagrams of new systems than existing ones. Our maybe a blend of new and old.
You could have it propose a spec or review a proposed spec to also get diagrams in a similar manner.
I just use D2 for this.
Zindex is a stateful diagram runtime for agents. Agents create diagrams by sending structured operations through the Diagram Scene Protocol (DSP) - the platform validates, normalizes, and renders durable scene state rather than one-shot output.
how does Zindex compares to Mermaid?