No Pass, No Ship

#AI#Indie Dev

Getting AI to draw architecture diagrams isn’t news anymore. What’s news is whether the diagrams are any good.

We’ve all seen the usual problems: lines running right over the labels, boxes shoved off the page, every arrow piling into the same spot. Looks lively at first glance; look closer and it’s useless. Worse, the diagram doesn’t match the code. It draws a service your project doesn’t even have, and draws it pretty convincingly too.

There’s a new open source project that does exactly one thing: draw diagrams. And its rule is: if it doesn’t pass, it doesn’t ship.

Cartoon: on the left, a grey square-headed robot holds up a blue blueprint reading “{ JSON }”. In the middle, a conveyor belt runs through a QC gate with a sign reading “No pass, no ship” and a red light and a green light on top. In front of the gate, a diagram with lines over its labels and boxes poking out of the frame is stamped “REDO” in red, and a dashed red arrow sends it back to the robot. Past the gate, a neatly laid-out diagram is stamped “OK” in green. On the right, lzbob in a black baseball cap waits to receive it.
Blueprints go through QC first. Lines on the labels, boxes out of bounds: back you go, draw it again.

What is it, anyway

The project is Archify, by tt-a1i on GitHub. It isn’t a website. It’s an agent skill you install into your AI assistant.

It opened shop in April 2026 and has 91,000 stars so far (91,081 when I looked) and over 6,000 forks, and in early September it hit number one on GitHub’s weekly trending chart across all languages. The license is Apache-2.0. It used to be MIT, and releases from before the switch are still MIT. Latest version: v3.2.0.

In one sentence: it turns an idea, a plan, or a whole codebase into a technical diagram you can click, inspect, and trace paths through.

How it’s different from other AI diagram tools

Last time I wrote about Next AI Draw.io, which draws draw.io diagrams while you chat and hands you a diagram you can keep editing by hand.

Archify takes a different road. It doesn’t let the model draw directly. It splits the job into three steps:

  1. Blueprint first. The AI writes a typed JSON spec. Each kind of diagram has its own schema, spelling out item by item what’s a component, what’s storage, and who calls whom.
  2. Then build from the blueprint. Archify generates an HTML file from that JSON. Same blueprint, same diagram, every time, with no relying on the model to wing it.
  3. QC before it leaves the factory. Is the format valid, is the layout a mess, are lines running over text, is anything spilling out of its box: all checked, one by one. Fail, and it gets sent back with a ticket saying which rule failed, where, and how to fix it, and the AI reworks it by the ticket. Only a new diagram that passes replaces the old one. If it fails, you still have the last one that passed.

So its diagrams look designed, not generated.

The README puts it bluntly: Archify is not a general-purpose diagram editor, and it’s not Mermaid with a new skin.

What it can draw

Ten kinds in all:

  • Architecture: components, services, storage, trust boundaries
  • Workflow: CI/CD, approvals, tool calls, runbooks
  • Sequence: API calls, cache fallbacks, auth, async chains
  • Data flow: data pipelines, lineage, sensitive data, who’s using what
  • Lifecycle: states, retries, waits, how things finally end up
  • ER: database tables, columns, primary and foreign keys, one-to-many and many-to-many
  • Class: classes, interfaces, who inherits from whom, who depends on whom
  • Tree: directory structures, module breakdowns
  • Timeline: incident postmortems, release history
  • Waterfall: where a request’s time actually went

The last five only arrived in version 3.1.

A codebase is optional. No code? One sentence of description gets you a diagram. Got code? Have it read the repo first, and every node it draws is tagged with where it came from: one click opens the source file at the right line, pinned to a specific commit. Whether the diagram is right, you can check in a second.

What you can do with it

What you get is a standalone HTML file. No need to install Archify; open it in a browser and play (the official site has a whole pile of examples you can click around in):

  • Click a node to see what it drags along downstream and what it leans on upstream.
  • Pick two ends and light up the path between them.
  • Flip between dark and light in one click.
  • Export images, and even share cards.

Not happy? Keep chatting: “add Redis,” “move auth to the left,” “highlight the rollback path.” The blueprint is still there, so it changes only what you asked for and leaves everything else alone.

There’s also a thing called Architecture Delta: it compares the before and after architecture blueprints and shows you at a glance what was added, removed, or moved. Made for PR reviews.

And if you ask it a question, it can answer with a whole page: conclusion up top, then one section per question, with tables, steps and diagrams, and the diagrams have passed QC too.

Installing it

npx skills add tt-a1i/archify -g

Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode get the full feature set, and Cursor works too. Once it’s installed, just talk to it like a person:

Use Archify to draw a web request: the browser calls the API, the API checks Redis
first, falls back to PostgreSQL on a miss, then writes the result back to the cache.

By the way, it checks for new versions every so often. It only reminds you; it won’t quietly upgrade itself, and it doesn’t send your project or prompts anywhere. If that bugs you, set ARCHIFY_UPDATE_CHECK_DISABLED=1 and it’s off for good. The README spells all of this out. Classy.

Parting shots

AI diagrams used to come out first and wait for you to find the mistakes. Archify finds its own mistakes before you ever see the thing.

These days even an AI’s diagrams have to pass inspection before they leave the factory. Which is more than you can say for most people’s slide decks.

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