title: "So, You're Tired of Drawing Flowcharts? Maybe Talk to This Thing Instead." date: "2024-07-28" excerpt: "Let's be honest, manually mapping out processes is a drag. I stumbled onto something that takes plain text and spits out diagrams. Is it the magic bullet? I took it for a spin."
So, You're Tired of Drawing Flowcharts? Maybe Talk to This Thing Instead.
Alright, hands up if you've ever stared blankly at a screen, cursor blinking, knowing you need to make a diagram. A flowchart to nail down a business process, a sequence diagram for some code logic, just something visual to make sense of the tangled mess in your head or explain it to someone else. Yeah, me too. It's rarely the fun part of the job, is it? Dragging shapes, connecting lines, making sure everything lines up just so... it takes time. Precious, non-renewable time.
For years, I've bounced between tools. The big, clunky enterprise ones, the slick-but-still-manual online editors, even just sketching on a whiteboard (which, inevitably, someone takes a terrible photo of). None of it felt quite right. The friction between the idea in my head and the visual output was always there.
Then I started hearing whispers about this idea: generating diagrams from text. Just... typing. It sounded a bit too good to be true, frankly. My brain immediately went to code – like, real coding for diagrams, which didn't sound much easier than drawing. But the pitch was simpler: natural language descriptions. Describe your process, and poof, diagram.
Intrigued (and let's be real, desperate to avoid another session with a drag-and-drop interface), I poked around and landed on one that claimed it could do just that – take my plain English words and turn them into a clear flowchart. The one I checked out was hosted over at textimagecraft.com/zh/mermaid (yeah, the zh in the URL threw me for a second, but it's got an English interface and does the job in English).
So, I gave it a whirl.
Instead of opening a canvas, I got a text box. The instructions were something like "tell me your process." Okay, simple enough. I started typing out a basic workflow: "User logs in," "System checks credentials," "If valid, go to Dashboard," "If invalid, show error message," "User can try again."
The magic happened on the other side. As I typed, a diagram started assembling itself. Nodes appeared, arrows connected them. It wasn't instant, mind you, and I quickly realized "natural language" still meant being reasonably structured with your language. You can't just ramble; you need to use clear actions and transitions. But crucially, I wasn't drawing. I was describing.
This is where it felt genuinely different. It wasn't about my mouse skills or wrestling with alignment guides. It was about articulating the logic. The tool acted like a translator, taking my thought process, written out step-by-step, and visualizing it.
For anyone who needs to quickly document processes, this feels like a significant shortcut. Need to map out a user journey? Type it. Explaining a complex decision tree? Write down the conditions and outcomes. It forces clarity in your description because if you're vague, the diagram will be vague (or just wrong). It's like rubber-duck debugging, but you get a picture at the end.
Is it perfect? Not always. Sometimes you need to tweak the wording to get the diagram exactly how you envision it. And for super complex, highly custom visuals with weird shapes and annotations, you'll probably still need a dedicated drawing tool.
But for the vast majority of flowcharts, sequence diagrams, or just visual aids needed to explain complex steps visually or visualizing business workflows, typing is just faster. It feels less like graphic design and more like structured writing, which, for many of us buried in documentation, is a welcome change.
Think about it: the effort required to create flowcharts from text versus dragging shapes. One feels like drafting; the other feels like detailed illustration. When speed and clarity are the goals, drafting often wins.
It's not just an alternative to drawing flowcharts; it's a fundamentally different way to approach the task. It shifts the focus from the drawing itself to the structure and logic you're trying to represent. And for me, that shift makes the whole process far less painful, and dare I say, even a little bit intuitive. It definitely helps easily document processes when the barrier to entry is just a keyboard.
So yeah, if you're tired of the traditional diagramming dance, maybe give this "talk-to-it-and-see-what-it-draws" approach a try. You might be surprised how quickly you can translate those messy thoughts into a clean, visual map.