tbiehn

Nice (and MIT Licensed!) - I'll give this a shot.

Another thing these types of tools bring is multiplayer support. Which I found my distributed teams really benefiting from over time.

This project (and others like it) are graphviz wrappers - they do some really cool stuff to emit styled .dot files that look better than writing and rendering raw gv.#

Allowing specification in Python offers very little advantage - in theory you think, hey, I've got hi-lighting, autocompletion, and so on from an IDE. It'll play nice in VCS. Maybe I can interrogate orchestration layers and so on to produce dynamic views.

In practice diagrams are produced by folks who might not want to use or learn python [or golang, their other implementation]. Instead a lean purpose-build DSL, maybe even an extension of graphviz dot, is easier and more portable for some audiences to pick up. Secondly, we can't JUST graft a DSL front-end onto these tools because the styled components are baked into the project.

My personal experience with layout engines is that they work OK for very small architecture diagrams, but become ugly or inelegant at useful scales.

I (and the teams I've worked with) settle on draw.io, either the desktop app, or committed as part of confluence, as the best way to describe intent/design - and rendering graphviz with a style up top for anything dynamic.

Would welcome seeing a true extension to the dot language that can unlock reasoning engines (like to do threat modeling) and render-time styling.

Interesting idea - do you handle ‘dead keys’ as well? Let’s say you optimistically re-fetch a few times, but no client re-requests?

Just imagine if we didn’t use heuristics to fix arbitrary inputs and instead we used some sort of learning algorithm that was trained on producing valid looking json - then all we’d need to do is add a prompt and start with some random noise… :P

I’m chatting with a founder who started building a moderation pipeline with gpt-4 w/ embeddings to save credits & time. Seems like something that will become ubiquitous.

A tip for your context window problem: prefer ‘editing’ a previous message to add whatever clarification is required - rather than having a ‘chat.’ Definitely helps keep it on the rails.

Another factor; so many programs today either require or… at least try a network connection before they actually DO anything.