Mermaid

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “mermaid swim lane diagrams are my go to tool for designing system architecture”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-11

• “running into issues with markdown and mermaid the other day and decided to tell Claude to use HTML”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-09

• “I've had models produce very reasonable Mermaid diagrams that matched the intended design but not the actual program. It felt helpful until I realized I was reviewing the plan twice and the implementation zero times.”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-26

• “excellent luck using Claude Code to generate "mermaid diagrams" for me”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-19

• “I actually like Mermaid's text-based approach a lot and wouldn't want to replace it with a visual editor”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-15

• “Mermaid's "You cannot define transitions between internal states belonging to different composite states" [1] has driven me up a wall for years”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-15

• “I love mermaid because I'm a huge fan of anything related to code that can I check into git, track its evolution and the thinking that went behind it”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-30

• “the mermaid code can live next to the document source, and I need not search for the original diagram file to edit and export”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-30

• “I went a different route using diagram-as-code with Mermaid instead of manual drawing”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-30

• “I am a huge fan of mermaid diagrams because it lets me check in my diagrams into git”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-30

• “I used a native CoreGraphics renderer for Mermaid (BeautifulMermaid) so the diagrams update without any flicker”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-21

• “A similar win I've found is documentating process flows with mermaid diagrams”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-18

• “LLMs love end-of-line comments, but Mermaid.js often doesn't”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-12

• “Mermaid is really bad about cutting off text after spaces, so you have to insert <br>s everywhere.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-03-12

• “Mermaid diagrams, which the AIs love to write and can convey quite a lot of complexity in an easily consumable format”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-03

• “Mermaid diagrams are even better because you don't waste characters on the visual representation but rather the relationships between them.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-13

• “mermaid doesn't look awful just typed out, but anyone who has the extension installed is leveled up”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-13

• “Mermaid validation is a huge issue given how mermaid.js is architected”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-01-29

• “I added Mermaid diagrams to a project in a few minutes of work”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-01-29

• “I love Mermaid and Markdown as a combination for documentation”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-29

• “Getting AI to generate valid mermaid diagrams on scale extremely hard.”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-29

• “Mermaid lacks. The last time I checked, Mermaid couldn't render subgraphs in a different direction than the overall graph.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-29

• “we ended up with a mermaid diagram that's legible to me, but it's also a great format for it to use”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-23

• “Mermaid diagrams that were nearly as unintelligible as the original post”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-23

• “I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-13