A few things to point out after reading and thinking about this:

- Another AI firm building products focused on Fortune 500 scale problems. If you're not at a F500, this tool isn't necessarily a good fit for you, so YMMV.

- static analysis tools that produce flowcharts and diagrams like this have existed since antiquity, and I'm not seeing any new real innovation other than "letting the LLM produce it".

They say it's ZDR, so maybe I don't fully understand what problem they're trying to solve, but in general I don't see the value add for a system like this. Also onboarding isn't necessarily just presenting flow charts and diagrams: one of the biggest things you can do to onboard somebody is level-set and provide them with problem context. You COULD go into a 30 minute diatribe about how "this is the X service, which talks to the Y service, and ..." and cover a whiteboard in a sprawling design diagram, or you could just explain to them "this is the problem we're working on", using simple, compact analogies where/when applicable. If the codebase is primarily boilerplate patterns, like CRUD, MVC, or Router/Controller/Service/DB, why talk about them? Focus on the deviant patterns your team uses. Focus on the constraints your team faces, and how you take the unbeaten path to navigate those constraints.

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_jayhack_ 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> static analysis tools that produce flowcharts and diagrams like this have existed since antiquity, and I'm not seeing any new real innovation other than "letting the LLM produce it".

Inherent limitation of static analysis-only visualization tools is lack of flexibility/judgement on what should and should not be surfaced in the final visualization.

The produced visualizations look like machine code themselves. Advantage of having LLMs produce code visualizations is the judgement/common sense on the resolution things should be presented at, so they are intuitive and useful.

	▲	gnarlouse 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Although I haven't personally experienced the feeling of "produced visualizations looking like machine code", I can appreciate the argument you're making wrt judgment-based resolution scaling.

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bigiain 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> static analysis tools that produce flowcharts and diagrams like this have existed since antiquity

Today I am apparently on of xkcd's "Lucky 10,000".

Does anyone have any recommendations for such tools? Ideally open source, but that's not a hard requirement. (Although "Enterprise - if you have to ask the price you can't afford it" options will not work for me.)

I'm particularity interested tools that work with Python, Java, and Javascript (Angular flavoured Javascript, it if matters)?

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szjanikowski a day ago | parent | next [-]

We are building https://noesis.vision/ a similar tool to extract the system architecture from the source code according to the patterns. We are now in beta for .NET.

After working with the topic for multiple months I can tell you that introductions for new-joiners are not the only use case for this kind of extracted knowledge. Many ppl in the organizations need insights into the software structure as they either impact decisions shaping this structure (e.g. analysts) or depend on the decisions about this structure (e.g. testers, or support agents)

It's all the matter of giving access to reliable architecture knowledge structured by a consistent ontology. Garbage in / garbage out - the higher the knowledge quality, the better the output - both for human and agentic knowledge consumers.

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dilawar a day ago | parent [-]

Love what you are trying to do here.

Will evaluate it on a couple of PHP codebases I maintain at work.

Is there a way to contribute to the project?

	▲	szjanikowski 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, please join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/QF5PMX4Dqg It would be easiest to discuss all the options there :)

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seafisher a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm currently building one based on tree-sitter: https://github.com/CRJFisher/code-charter. It's still in development but will be released soon (this year). Will support Python, JS/TS, Rust to begin with others (like Java) to follow.

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gnarlouse 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://www.ensoftcorp.com/products/atlas is the Java/c oriented flavor I'm most familiar with. I've used them for Javascript before previously, although I'd have to do some digging to find the particular package I used. I am confident that you could find one with an npm/pypi search.

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recursivecaveat a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's been a few years, but I remember jetbrains IDEs had these, though I'm not totally sure it was built-in rather than a plugin. Personally I find automated diagrams are not that useful. You generally need to have some understanding of what's happening to know what to hide and collapse to tame the spaghetti. So it needs someone in the know to be explanatory, and as a tool it requires a similar amount of fiddling to just drawing some boxes in slideware.

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swyx 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

one of my earliest blogposts at Netlify https://www.netlify.com/blog/2018/08/23/how-to-easily-visual...