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Comment by TranquilMarmot | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this. I'm usually not a fan of auto-generated diagrams at all.

I would rather spend the extra time making something that's more readable and has a better layout.

The only exception for me would be for something that changes frequently where any diagram made by hand would go out of date quickly or be burdensome to maintain (not that diagrams usually get maintained...)

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There's absolutely value in being able to partially generate (maybe just the nodes/edges, but without final layout), or possibly even just validate that a given diagram does actually match a given schema/definition, without necessarily solving the extremely hard problem of a good looking auto-layout.

I've dabbled in the past with trying to do auto-layout of new items while preserving explicit changes by hacking at some of the Cytoscape.js layout providers to heavily penalise moves to manually positioned nodes, but I've never managed to make anything close to what I'd call acceptable for general use.

> The only exception for me would be for something that changes frequently where any diagram made by hand would go out of date quickly or be burdensome to maintain (not that diagrams usually get maintained...)

I think there is something of a truism here... hand-made diagrams don't get updated because they are so hard to maintained.

Very true! It seems like it's either an out-of-date hand-made diagram that's readable, or an automatically updated diagram that's incomprehensible.

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