Archify

Why it's ranked here

The verdict rests on how seriously the project treats correctness rather than just visuals. Before any output ships, structural checks run against a defined schema, duplicate identifiers are rejected, and a delivery command freezes the input and verifies the final file with a hash before replacing anything. That is unusual rigor for a diagramming tool, and it is paired with a permissive open license and a genuine test suite rather than a demo repository dressed up with badges.

What's good

Validation happens at multiple stages: the structure of the input, the layout, the rendered markup, and any authored route between elements, and a candidate is discarded rather than shipped if any stage fails. Comparing two versions of the same picture produces an itemized list of what was added, removed, moved, or rerouted, which is more useful for a pull request than a fresh image with no context. The optional update check is opt-out and deliberately minimal, sending nothing beyond ordinary network metadata.

Tradeoffs

The project is still a pre-release development build, not a finished 1.0, so interfaces described today may shift before a stable release. It only produces diagrams from structured input: a person or an agent still has to author or extract that structure by hand, and the tool explicitly refuses to guess at topology it was not given. Browser-based visual verification also depends on having a Chromium-family browser installed locally.

How to use it well

This fits a workflow where an agent already understands a codebase or a proposed design and needs to hand a reviewer something concrete: a system sketch for a design discussion, a call-by-call diagram for a tricky cache path, or a comparison between two versions of a system map attached to a pull request. It is not a general drawing tool and does not replace freehand diagramming when no structured source of truth exists yet.

Observed

License

MIT licensed, per README.md and the license field in archify/package.json.

Packaging

Node.js CLI distributed as an ES module package (type: module) requiring Node.js 18 or newer, per archify/package.json.

CLI entry point

Single CLI entry point declared via a bin field (archify) in archify/package.json.

Dependencies

Dev dependencies limited to ajv, parse5, saxes and simple-icons, with a pinned override for fast-uri, per archify/package.json.

Distribution

archify/package.json marks the package private, so it is installed through a skill-installer command rather than published to the public npm registry.

Test suite

A test script in archify/package.json runs a dedicated test suite, including a golden-file test and a shared test runner, as part of npm test.

CLI subcommands

CLI subcommands documented in docs/authoring-cookbook.md: doctor, validate, inspect, render, deliver, compare, guide; inspect is scoped to Architecture diagrams only.

Rendering pipeline

The shared rendering pipeline in archify/renderers/shared/cli.mjs runs schema validation, duplicate-identifier checks and a repository-evidence check before any output file is written.

Telemetry

The optional update check can be disabled via an environment variable and is documented as sending no version, agent, project, prompt or account/device identifiers (README.md).