[wdfx]

What's jarring me with the parent's example is the fact that the context managers must be holding global state.

It would feel a lot better if it was this, for example, where you use each context explicitly:

  from diagrams import Diagram
  from diagrams.aws.compute import EC2

  with Diagram("Simple Diagram") as d:
      d.add(EC2("web"))

As as the parent also suggests, this then doesn't really need the context management at all

  from diagrams import Diagram
  from diagrams.aws.compute import EC2

  d = Diagram("Simple Diagram")
  d.add(EC2("web"))

[baq]

yeah but then you have to repeat yourself a lot:

   d.add(first)
   d.add(second)
   d.add(...)

you see redundancy and a misused language capability, I see a feature and a nice DSL.