arkitect

Editable Draw.io and Excalidraw diagrams, generated and edited by your coding agent, on your machine.

Arkitect turns a small JSON spec into a .drawio or .excalidraw source file: real product icons embedded, every edge connected, laid out so nothing runs through anything. You keep editing it in Draw.io or Excalidraw. The agent writes the spec, builds, validates, renders the result and looks at it before it reports.

_{Built from a 48-node spec in one command, no hand-editing.}

Install

# Claude Code: the plugin, six skills, model-invoked
claude plugin marketplace add mouadja02/arkitect
claude plugin install arkitect@arkitect

# Any other agent, or the CLI alone
npm install -g arkitect
cd ~/my-project && arkitect install --all      # adapters for Codex, Cursor, Copilot, ...

# One command, nothing installed
npx arkitect excalidraw icon "postgres"

Then ask:

Draw an architecture for an event-driven order system: a web app posts to an API gateway, orders land on a queue, a worker validates them and writes to Postgres, failures go to a dead-letter queue, and a nightly job reconciles against the warehouse. Save it to docs/orders.excalidraw.

Every route, and setup per agent: docs/install.md.

What you get

• Two engines, one workflow. Draw.io for formal architecture a client or a review board will see; Excalidraw for sketches, system design and READMEs.
• 6,012 icons bundled. 4,850 marks in 18 shared packs (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, data platforms, databases, AI frameworks, streaming, observability, DevOps, security, SaaS, languages and more) plus 1,162 items across 36 Excalidraw libraries. Searched by product name, offline, and flagged when the match isn't clear enough to trust.
• Honesty about what's missing. A product nothing covers gets a placeholder, named in the report, never another product's mark. A real logo is fetched only when you ask.
• Layout the builder works out. Edges leave and enter from the right sides, route round what's in the way, and keep their labels clear; the routes survive dragging a node in Draw.io Desktop and in the Excalidraw app.
• Checks in code, not in the prompt. validate names every edge through an icon and every label over a border; the build report hands the agent the exact node to paste when a box should have been an icon or a boundary.
• Your style. The house style carries the evidence for each rule. Point the learning skill at your own diagrams and choose what to adopt.
• Nothing is uploaded. No telemetry, no hosted step, no dependencies.

What it optimises for

Two constraints outrank every feature: stay functional and lightweight (no dependencies, no services, no build step) and work with whatever model is driving, so a small local model gets a good diagram and not only a frontier one. Context is the scarce resource: each skill's reading budget is measured, and layout, icon resolution and validation live in scripts, not prompts. AGENTS.md has the full statement.

Which engine?

	Draw.io .drawio	Excalidraw .excalidraw
looks	crisp, formal, vendor icons	hand-drawn
for	a client, a review board, an RFC; AWS-heavy designs; several pages; as-is/to-be	system design, component and block diagrams, flows, README art
icons	18 packs, 4,850 marks + built-in mxgraph.aws4.* + fetched logos	1,162 native items across 36 libraries + 4,850 shared marks as embedded artwork
edit in	Draw.io Desktop or VS Code, never the hosted editor	the local container (npm run excalidraw:up) or excalidraw.com

_{The Draw.io starter template: every node kind, every connector kind, a generated legend.}

Agents

agent	loads	install
Claude Code	plugin: 6 skills, 5 hooks	claude plugin install arkitect@arkitect
Codex	AGENTS.md + .agents/skills/arkitect ($arkitect)	arkitect install codex
Cursor	.cursor/rules/arkitect.mdc + /arkitect	arkitect install cursor cursor-command
OpenCode	AGENTS.md + .opencode/command/arkitect.md	arkitect install opencode agents
GitHub Copilot	.github/copilot-instructions.md	arkitect install copilot
Antigravity, Pi	AGENTS.md	arkitect install antigravity / pi
Gemini CLI	GEMINI.md	arkitect install gemini
anything else	AGENTS.md, or paste it into the tool's rules	arkitect install agents

skill	runs
arkitect-drawio, arkitect-excalidraw	on their own, when a diagram is asked for
learn-drawio-style, learn-excalidraw-style	only when you type the command
apply-drawio-style, apply-excalidraw-style	only when you type the command

Documentation

install.md	every install route, npm and npx, setup per agent, update and removal
getting-started.md	your first diagram
cli.md	every command, the spec format, rendering
icons.md	what ships, how search decides, logos, libraries, placeholders
apps.md	the local Excalidraw container, Draw.io Desktop, the Draw.io MCP server
style.md	the house style, and making it yours
privacy.md	exactly what touches the network
testing.md	the offline suite, the redaction check, the evals
maintenance.md	the contract for changing this repository, releases
audit-prompt.md	the prompt that finds the next round of work
status.md	how work gets done, and decisions that can look unfinished

What changed in each release: CHANGELOG.md.

Privacy

Your diagrams never leave the machine. Two things reach the network, both public and free of anything about your architecture: a product logo you asked for by URL, and the public Excalidraw library catalogue. The Draw.io MCP tools that open the hosted editor are off-limits for your content, and the style record holds structural statistics only, which a test checks on every run. docs/privacy.md.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome: patterns, icon coverage, another agent adapter, a bug in a generator. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md; the suite is node tests/run-tests.mjs, offline, in about 20 seconds.

Credits and license

Arkitect draws with other people's work: the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud icon sets, Simple Icons, devicon, Lucide and Octicons, and 36 Excalidraw libraries from the public catalogue, each credited in ATTRIBUTION.md and the pack attribution.

MIT for the code, docs and generators. Bundled icon sets remain under their own terms; see NOTICE.