[vekker]

I use PlantUML a lot, for communicating complex technical designs for juniors to implement for example, or simply for documentation.

It's nice to have your diagrams as readable code which you can check in with the rest of your git repository and embed in READMEs, and the syntax is really intuitive and easy to learn. I haven't made the comparison with this particular tool yet, but in general I'd recommend this practice of including diagrams with your docs.

[Cerium]

I have been using PlantUML a lot. For me the effort of drawing a diagram in an external tool and then exporting it seems like such a waste compared to adding source code that compiles into the diagram I need.

As a nice bonus, GPT-4 is pretty good at generating valid PlantUML. I have given descriptions of the diagram I want and gotten results that have gone into docs unchanged.

[vekker]

Yep, GPT is nice for speeding up the process. I've gotten in the habit of actually speaking out loud the desired flow of events in a system and transcribing it, and then turning that text into sequence diagrams with GPT4.

[pantalaimon]

With pandoc-plot [0] you can even include them in your markdown documents and render it all to a nice PDF or website using pandoc.

[0] https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot