Custom Claude Code Skill: Auto-Generating / Updating Architecture Diagrams with Excalidraw
The article discusses a custom Claude Code skill that can automatically generate and update architecture diagrams using Excalidraw, a collaborative diagramming tool.
Why it matters
This skill helps maintain up-to-date, version-controlled, and collaborative architecture diagrams, which are essential for onboarding, explaining, and understanding complex infrastructure projects.
Key Points
- 1The skill analyzes the codebase (Terraform, Node.js, Python, etc.) to identify components, services, and their relationships
- 2It generates valid Excalidraw JSON files that can be version-controlled and collaborated on with a team
- 3The skill addresses the problem of outdated architecture diagrams by automatically updating them as the codebase changes
Details
The author maintains several GCP infrastructure projects with Terraform and faced the issue of having outdated or non-existent architecture diagrams. They explored different solutions, including ad-hoc prompts, Claude Code Skills, plugins, and hooks. They settled on a Claude Code Skill as the simplest approach to experiment with. The skill analyzes the codebase, identifies components and their relationships, and generates valid Excalidraw JSON files. This allows the diagrams to be version-controlled, collaborated on, and automatically updated as the codebase changes. The skill addresses challenges like generating proper labels and routing elbow arrows to create clean, professional-looking diagrams.
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