I built pretty.fish with the belief that Mermaid diagrams don’t have to look like they’re from the 80s and to avoid squinting at Mermaid diagrams that coding agents create in tiny windows.

Having them on canvas also makes it easier to keep a track of, and even visualize agent steps as and when they are are being taken (if you connect an MCP you get a pretty nice view of agent building its knowledge graph for eg for a problem).

Didn’t expect it to take off like this—there are still rough edges (pan/zoom, mobile), but I’m working on smoothing those out soon.

- How do you pan? Two finger sliding on the trackpad just zooms.

- Why does the diagram you're working on doesn't use all the remaining space? I picked one example and it's on a small-ish box with controls that don't seem to do anything and half of it is out the screen on the bottom

Ohh... the scroll metaphor... it's annoying. A bunch of tabs would have been better or even a one at a time with a tree somewhere.

There's too much fighting with layout where a plain interface would be better, something closer to https://mermaid.live/

Where I do see room for improvement is the rendering quality. A lot of diagrams end up looking a bit rough, especially with arrow routing and layout, which can feel somewhat arbitrary.

Better layout/rendering would probably add more value (for me at least) than improving the editing experience.

I built https://fishygram.com with a DSL you can copy and paste into ChatGPT to build diagrams for you.

You can take a look at the examples to see what it can do.