Hi HN folks, I'm a co-creator of the Dapr CNCF project and co-founder of Diagrid. Today we announced a free-to-use web app that takes any form of workflow diagram (UML, BPMN, scribble in your favorite drawing tool or even on paper) and generates code that runs in any IDE and that can be deployed to Kubernetes and other container based systems, based on Dapr's durable execution workflow engine. This essentially allows you to run durable workflows in minutes and leaves out the guesswork for how to structure, code and optimize a code-first workflow app. I'm happy for you to give this a try and provide feedback!
This reminds me of the UML/RUP era from the early 2000s....
Is that an attempt to revive or even resurrect UML diagrams and Rational Unified Process blending it with AI? I would bet it's all dead forever. I'm skeptical about diagram-driven development making a comeback. In my experience, developers today prefer more agile, code-first approaches because requirements change rapidly and maintaining diagram-code synchronization is an unbearable challenge.
To me that homepage feels like when you start a new 8-part TV show by accidentally watching episode 6.<p>I see some thing I recognize, diagrams, but nothing else makes sense.
This is really cool as far as the application goes, but I do have a question on how you plan to compete/differentiate, if at all. I fed the same image to one of the flagship LLMs and was able to generate, more or less, the same dapr scaffold. You might probably be able to fine tune towards dapr use case better, but if one of the flagship models that people already use is going to come close, then it becomes a hard sell.<p>I suppose it's also a general question about the many new AI applications in the market, because these flagship models are getting really good by the day, and seem to be eating up into each and every of those use cases.
Interesting. A future to consider, like it tries to understand our existing code(from GitHub or anyway) and generate new code that fits in well with what we already have?
Intead of "Step 1: Upload Your Diagram", if you could say "describe your diagram", that would take it to the next level. So you would generate a workflow from the description using an llm which the user could then edit. This takes out the painful part of diagram creation and makes it fun for the user. For example, for infra automation a description could be: "first download this from this url. then, run this command, then take the output and feed it to this, then reboot, email me if there is any problem".
This is cool. I remember not too long ago I had a professor telling me that this was essentially the future of software engineering and that soon we won't be writing code as we know it today. I believed him, I just didn't think we'd be seeing it here so soon.<p>Any plans to create systems that allow this to be embedded in existing code bases? It'd be neat to be able to sketch out new systems that your tool could generate code for that seamlessly hooks into an existing system's architecture, especially if it could have a UX similar to how copilot or cursor behave in how they're directly inline with the code.
I’m all in for diagrams in discussing software! When there is no whiteboard, I literally draw in the air to explain my point.
However, doing real, orthodox UML/BPMN requires everyone to understand the official notation, the difference e.g. between an „association“ and a „message flow“ (and then the differences between UML 1.4 and 2.0) etc. Do people really work in environments where all stakeholders have that kind of knowledge? Big corps I could imagine, probably where heavy machinery is involved. Aside from those „we build a cruise ship“ megaprojects I have the impression that people say UML and mean the much more approachable „squares connected by diamonds and labeled arrows“-diagrams.<p>Wondering how no-code tools like this handle those discrepancies between the super-detailed specs and the real world diagrams
1. yeah this is nice, making it easier to generate workflows is always good. i think the challenge is always versioning and proper error handling - if the diagram the user sends in doesnt properly model the work done, then you're SOL.<p>2. (sorry to bring it up but have to ask) how does Diagrid/Dapr compare to Temporal? i browsed your docs but there wasn't much that came up. is Dapr strictly dag based?