[solatic]

If you want to understand the underlying problem, think about geographical mapping (e.g. Google Maps). When drawing a map, how do you decide what gets featured? Roads, businesses? How big can the text be? How do you keep it all readable?

Diagramming is the same problem, but usually lacking the context to decide what to draw. The same stakeholders may be interested in different combinations of features depending on which business questions they're trying to answer. Geographic mapping is practically a constrained domain by comparison. And it's supposed to be feasible to do it automatically for systems diagrams? /hard-skeptic

[beardedwizard]

I understand the argument but think this is a straw man based on my experience. The issue isn't so much that people can't decide on the level of detail, it's that the diagram is drawn only once or in most cases never.

A dataflow diagram for example is mostly self constraining in scope.

Automating it is another problem entirely and I agree it has a lot of hard challenges.