> Before AI, I rarely created diagrams because of the effort involved. I didn’t want to spend time deciding box sizes or fidgeting with visual formatting details.

IMHO the author is missing out on a key part of learning here. If you are concerned about box sizes and formatting, you are (a) not actually using a pen/marker on physical medium, and/or (b) getting caught up in making it look 'nice'.

The point of whiteboarding a design is forcing you to think about it, whether it's existing code or something new. Having AI do it for you is akin to having a LLM with speech synthesis talk aloud to a rubber duck on your behalf to debug something.

If you want to document something, sure; roll those dice on a diagram. I personally haven't seen such solutions do well on more than a handful of components before associations and groupings get weird.

This is a great reminder and I need to start doing this. Bullet point plans aren’t enough for lots of vertical slice work unless it fits really neatly into well known buckets (e.g. Rails MVC)

I use ai to write diagrams too. But I use d2 instead of mermaid