A diagramming dev tool

D2 is designed towards a single goal: turn diagramming into a pleasant experience for engineers. Plenty of tools can claim to do that for simple diagrams, but you stop having a good time as soon as you get to even slightly complex diagrams — the ones that most need to exist.

Why is that? Because most diagramming tools today are design tools, not dev tools. They give you a blank canvas and a drag-and-drop toolbar like you'd see on Figma or Photoshop, and treat their intended workflow as a design process. Engineers are not visual designers, and the lack of ability to spatially architect a system should not block the creation of valuable documentation. Every drag and drop shouldn’t require planning, and updates shouldn’t be a frustrating exercise in moving things around and resizing to make room for the new piece. Declarative Diagramming removes that friction.

Before Hashicorp introduced Terraform to let engineers write infrastructure as text, they were clicking around AWS and Google Cloud consoles to configure their infrastructure. Nowadays, that's just unprofessional. Where's the review process, the rollback steps, the history and version control? It's hard to believe that the future of visual documentation in companies around the world will predominantly be made with drag-and-drop design tools.