quintu5
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
To work around this, I had claude code build me a questionnaire skill that takes a json file with a flexible schema as input and it then serves up a simple questionnaire web page on a node server where I can read the questions and give my responses either by selecting from preset tags supplied as part of the input or by including a text-based response.
The agent can include references to external images, html files, or mermaid diagrams and the page can render them all inline with the relevant question.
Once I'm done answering, I just save my responses and click a button to kill the server. The agent watching the process sees that it stopped and takes that as a signal to go read the responses from disk.
Works like a charm.
There are plenty of good reasons to choose an an open source tools and sure, the ability to personalize a tool at the source layer can be valuable enough in some instances to justify maintaining a fork manually or with an agent.
Asserting that dev tools must be open source to prioritize a paradigm where users roll the dice on adding features by one-shotting them with an agent and then burning tokens until the end of time to try to keep their forks compatible with upstream changes because plugin APIs are too restrictive doesn't pass muster.
My primary project is Mermaid Studio, an IDE grade Mermaid diagram authoring experience for both humans and agents built for JetBrains IDEs. Semantic highlighting, refactoring, 120+ inspections covering everything from common rendering issues and foot-guns to obscure syntax quirks, contextual completions, interactive (drag-and-drop) diagram editing and styling. A suite of included MCP tools surfaces the plugin's intelligence and rendering capabilities, so your preferred agent (even using relatively small local models) can generate correct diagrams, even the newest or more obscure ones with ease.
https://mermaidstudio.dev/ | https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/29870-mermaid-studio
Tinkering with several other IntelliJ plugin ideas that may or may not end up being released.
Still occasionally pushing up new features Tachi Code, my browser extension that brings a feature rich, highly customizable, Monaco Editor based code editor to the browser surfaces you always wished would be less of a pain to read. These days, I mostly use it for reading and printing Markdown files.
https://github.com/DavidSeptimus/alfred-jetbrains-launcher
Mostly, I use it to quickly open projects in cmux, but I use it for switching between git worktrees in IntelliJ too.
I migrated to macOS for development years ago and going back to Windows for development always felt gross, but I never had any issues with windows for entertainment/general productivity workflows. It's only once I tried 11 that I noped out for everything other than use as a Steam launcher.
It provides both syntax guides and syntax/semantic analysis as MCP Tools, so you can have an agent iteratively refine diagrams with good context for patterns like multi-line text and comments (LLMs love end-of-line comments, but Mermaid.js often doesn’t).
This post just inspired me to tackle this once and for all today.
I’ve had a lot of success dogfooding my own product, the Mermaid Studio plugin for JetBrains IDEs (https://mermaidstudio.dev).
It combines the deep semantic code intelligence of an IDE with a suite of integrated MCP tools that your preferred agent can plug into for static analysis, up to date syntax, etc.
I basically tell Claude Code to run the generated diagram through the analysis tool, fix issues it detects and repeat until fixed. Then generate a png or svg for a visual inspection before finalizing the diagram.
Now all of my planning and architecture docs are filled with illustrative flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and occasionally block diagrams for workshopping proposed UI layouts