Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things
- ID
- 29040
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 27 Sep 2026, 1:10 AM
- Fetched
- 27 Sep 2026, 9:29 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://github.com/reladraw/reladraw
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 27 Sep 2026, 9:29 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_agent_users
What happened
Reladraw is a text-based diagram language, posted as a Show HN, where placement is stated relative to other elements ("above-left of cluster.hub", "between cluster.desktop1 and cluster.laptop1") rather than via coordinates — its worked example examples/arch.reladraw renders an architecture diagram in 44 statements with no coordinates. The pitch positions it between auto-layout languages (Mermaid, Graphviz, D2), which decide placement for you, and absolute-positioning tools (draw.io, Excalidraw, Figma), which make every edit manual. It also ships a .claude/skills/reladraw directory, framing agent-driven diagram editing as the main use case: agents find coordinates expensive to work out and change. The thread drew 172 points and 52 comments; the repo shows 275 stars and 56 commits, and the syntax is still a draft in SYNTAX.md.
Why it matters
If you keep architecture diagrams in Mermaid/D2 and have an agent or teammate edit them, the friction is real: in those formats you cannot say "put this module to the right, just so," and in draw.io/Excalidraw every change is hand-work plus coordinate parsing for the agent. Reladraw is worth a 10-minute trial against one of your own diagrams before you standardise anything — but treat it as pre-1.0: 56 commits, syntax still in SYNTAX.md as a draft, and 275 stars means no production track record yet. There is no Malaysia-specific hook in this item.
Discussion angle
Auto-layout vs declared placement for LLM-generated diagrams: when an agent is told to "move the auth service next to the API," which format actually survives the round-trip — Mermaid, D2, or a relative-placement DSL like this one? Bring one real diagram and try the edit in both.