Structly

Architecture as code — diagrams that update when code does

5 followers

Architecture as code — diagrams that update when code does

5 followers

Describe your system in a sentence — or point Structly at a repo — and get a diagram you can actually read. Click a box to see what it does, press play to trace a request end to end. The JSON lives in your repo, so the picture changes when the code does.

Free

Launch tags:Design Tools•Developer Tools•GitHub

Launch Team / Built With

Customer.ioAutomate Messaging Everywhere — Startups Get 12 Months Free

Promoted

Maker

📌

👋 Hey Product Hunt, Every architecture diagram I've ever drawn died the same way: beautiful in Lucid/Miro/Excalidraw on day one, quietly wrong by week three, and openly lying about the system within a month. Nobody updates the picture, so eventually nobody trusts it. I built Structly so the diagram can't drift from the code, because it lives with the code. It's an architecture diagram described as a plain .structly.json file you commit to your repo. That one decision unlocks a few things: It's generated, not hand-drawn. Describe your system in a sentence ("a web app, an API, a Postgres DB, and a worker draining a queue") or point it at a GitHub repo, and you get a first diagram in seconds. Edit from there. It's actually readable. Click any box to read what it does. Press play to follow a single request through the whole system, hop by hop. It diffs. It's JSON in version control, so the diagram shows up in code review next to the change that caused it. No more "update the wiki" tickets nobody does. It meets you where you work. There's a VS Code extension with schema validation, autocomplete, snippets, and a live preview right beside your file. Generation runs on Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 today, with Opus 4.8 coming soon. Honestly, this started as me scratching my own itch. I was buried in a big codebase where the only "map" of the system was a diagram that hadn't been true in over a year, and I kept re-deriving the architecture in my head every time I touched something. I wanted a picture that stayed honest without anyone having to babysit it. It's free to try — no signup to generate your first diagram. Just describe your system and go. I'd love your honest feedback, especially: does the generated diagram match how you'd actually draw your system? And what would make this a permanent part of your repo? I'm in the comments all day. — Harshith

Report

12d ago

Forum Threads

p/structly-architecture-as-code

•

12d ago

Be honest — when did your architecture diagram last match the code?

Every team I've been on has had "the diagram" somewhere a Miro board, a Lucid file, a photo of a whiteboard and on every team it was quietly wrong within a month or two. Nobody updates it, so eventually nobody trusts it, and new engineers just re-derive the system in their heads.

How do you document your system's architecture today and does it stay accurate?
Have you just given up on diagrams and rely on reading the code?
If a diagram could stay in sync automatically, what would it need to do for you to actually keep it around?

Not looking for validation I want the honest version, including "diagrams are a waste of time." Curious what's worked and what hasn't for you.

View all