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.
Yes. It's CASE[0] all over again.
I've found you can already paste an architecture diagram into Cursor and use that to guide code[1]. I make mine in Xmind because there's no need for special, rigid formatting.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engi...
[1] Diagram as code example from my dev blog: https://davidbethune.com/blog/watsonDevBlog28
I believe in UML usefulness as a whiteboard/blackboard language. A fun way to explain what you need or what you imagine to be a good architecture, but that's all, it's a drafting tool. But then, why not using it as a communication tool ? You would draft something on the board, the LLM would generate the program. Sometimes it is simpler to draw 5 rectangles, name then and show their relationships in UML class modeling than to explain it textually.
UML class diagrams in mermaid syntax require less code than just defining actual classes with stubbed attrs and methods in some programming languages.
Years ago I tried ArgoUML for generating plone classes/models, but there was a limit to how much custom code could be round-tripped and/or stuffed into UML XML IIRC.
Similarly, no-code tools are all leaky abstractions: they model with UI metaphors only a subset of patterns possible in the target programming language, and so round-trip isn't possible after adding code to the initial or periodic code-generation from the synced abstract class diagram.
Instead, it's possible to generate [UML class] diagrams from minimal actual code. For example, the graph_models management command in Django-extensions generates GraphViz diagrams from subclasses of django.models.Model. With code to diagram workflow (instead of the reverse), you don't need to try and stuff code in the extra_code attr of a modeling syntax so that the generated code can be patched and/or transformed after every code generation from a diagram.
https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_mod...
I wrote something similar to generate (IDEF1X) diagrams from models for the specified waterfall process for an MIS degree capstone course.
It may be easier to prototype object-oriented code with UML class diagrams in mermaid syntax, but actual code shouldn't be that tough to generate diagrams from.
IIRC certain journals like ACM have their own preferred algorithmic pseudocode and LaTeX macros.
This is a way to give developers and semi-technical people a way to generate and run code-first workflows using a visual language, be it UML or otherwise. We will be expanding support for text prompts in the future
Code-first is kinda moving towards prompt-first. A diagram is just another way to prompt, so I can see this making a comeback, esp. with AI taking over more and more code.
If it weren't for the ambiguity of prompts and nondeterministic nature of the model.
Set the seed.
Reply to post: "any"?
[0] I accept large checks for allowing setting seeds on-prem.
not setting a seed is a feature - not a bug, otherwise lots of people with similar prompts will generate an exactly the same source code
Very much so, and in next iterations we will be expanding the scope both in what the generated code does as well as the ways to prompt