Diagram tools are broken, people are building replacements

Two separate Show HN posts hit today around diagramming: Reladraw, a diagram language where you control placement, and Drawgent, a coding agent that works on a live Excalidraw canvas. Both are responses to the same frustration with Mermaid, the comments in the Reladraw thread were unusually direct: 'This genuinely fucks. Fighting with Mermaid is so frustrating, especially when it comes to normal vs GitHub formatting.'

The through-line: Mermaid is everywhere but nobody loves it. Its auto-layout breaks predictably, its syntax behaves differently across environments, and it gives you no control over placement. Reladraw explicitly positions itself as the alternative where you decide where things go. Drawgent takes a different approach, using an LLM agent to draw on a shared canvas.

The Drawgent thread surfaced a real philosophical split: 'the value I get from producing a diagram is derived from the thinking' versus the practical reality that most diagrams are documentation artifacts that just need to exist.