I've been deep in the IntelliJ plugin rabbit hole.
My primary project is Mermaid Studio, an IDE grade Mermaid diagram authoring experience for both humans and agents built for JetBrains IDEs. Semantic highlighting, refactoring, 120+ inspections covering everything from common rendering issues and foot-guns to obscure syntax quirks, contextual completions, interactive (drag-and-drop) diagram editing and styling. A suite of included MCP tools surfaces the plugin's intelligence and rendering capabilities, so your preferred agent (even using relatively small local models) can generate correct diagrams, even the newest or more obscure ones with ease.
Tinkering with several other IntelliJ plugin ideas that may or may not end up being released.
Still occasionally pushing up new features Tachi Code, my browser extension that brings a feature rich, highly customizable, Monaco Editor based code editor to the browser surfaces you always wished would be less of a pain to read. These days, I mostly use it for reading and printing Markdown files.
Too many to count. Most recently, an Alfred workflow for opening my IntelliJ projects either in an an IDE or terminal that also comes with an integrated build task runner, so I can quickly discover and run build tasks even when I don’t have a project opened anywhere.
You're the first person I've seen call out 10 as going downhill. What were your complaints about 10?
I migrated to macOS for development years ago and going back to Windows for development always felt gross, but I never had any issues with windows for entertainment/general productivity workflows. It's only once I tried 11 that I noped out for everything other than use as a Steam launcher.
> Windows 8 may have got rid of the start menu, and Windows 10 did bring it back, but in a weird hybrid form with "live tiles".
Windows 8 eventually caved and added it back in. I'll sound crazy, but I didn't mind it taking up the whole screen. Windows 8 gave me this interesting feeling that my OS was wrapping around an older version of Windows with Metro, and for whatever reason I loved it. I also did have a touch-screen laptop that I loved, hell I still have it... I bought it the week Windows 8 came out... and it runs Linux now.
> I noped out for everything other than use as a Steam launcher.
I definitely recommend you spend a weekend checking out either Ubuntu or EndeavourOS (Arch based) and install Steam, enable Proton for all games, and add the "bypass" for native games to play natively (I forget where this setting was) and you will be shocked how many games play on Linux just as well as they do on Windows, in some cases better.
This is one of the issues I’ve attempted to tackle with the Mermaid Studio plugin for IntelliJ.
It provides both syntax guides and syntax/semantic analysis as MCP Tools, so you can have an agent iteratively refine diagrams with good context for patterns like multi-line text and comments (LLMs love end-of-line comments, but Mermaid.js often doesn’t).
This has been my exact experience with agents using gradle and it’s beyond frustrating to watch. I’ve been meaning to set up my own low-noise wrapper script.
This post just inspired me to tackle this once and for all today.
Yeah, AI generated diagrams can be pretty hit or miss. The lack of good quality examples in training data and minimal documentation for these tools can make it difficult for models to even get basic syntax correct for more complex diagrams.
I’ve had a lot of success dogfooding my own product, the Mermaid Studio plugin for JetBrains IDEs (https://mermaidstudio.dev).
It combines the deep semantic code intelligence of an IDE with a suite of integrated MCP tools that your preferred agent can plug into for static analysis, up to date syntax, etc.
I basically tell Claude Code to run the generated diagram through the analysis tool, fix issues it detects and repeat until fixed. Then generate a png or svg for a visual inspection before finalizing the diagram.
Now all of my planning and architecture docs are filled with illustrative flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and occasionally block diagrams for workshopping proposed UI layouts
One major downside of native rendering is the lack of layout consistency if you’re editing natively and then sharing anywhere else where the diagram will be rendered by mermaid.js.
This is a perfect use case! The v0.3.0 crate will have:
- parse() → AST
- layout() → positioned elements
- render_svg() → SVG string
- render_png() → via resvg (no browser needed)
CLI usage would be something like:
mermaid-rs diagram.mmd -o diagram.png> # or pipe from stdin> cat diagram.mmd | mermaid-rs --format svg > output.svg>
For your mark integration, you'd be able to call it as a subprocess or use it as a Rust library directly if you're building in Rust.
If you want to follow progress or have input on the API, feel free to open an issue on the repo!
Markdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension (https://tachicode.com/).
Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.
Well you see he ran it through in through an LLM, but LLMs are lossy, so who can say if the output was a direct result of the copyrighted code or if the model focused on his unique prompting words and conjured the output from its own latent space without referencing copyrighted input at all? /s
Alternatively, we could take the model makers’ view and say that if they didn’t want their code reused, they wouldn’t have made it publicly accessible on the internet.
the model makers opinion is no different than "if she didn't want to be ogled/cat called, she shouldn't have been wearing [insert literally any type of clothing here] when travelling from A to B in a public place"
My primary project is Mermaid Studio, an IDE grade Mermaid diagram authoring experience for both humans and agents built for JetBrains IDEs. Semantic highlighting, refactoring, 120+ inspections covering everything from common rendering issues and foot-guns to obscure syntax quirks, contextual completions, interactive (drag-and-drop) diagram editing and styling. A suite of included MCP tools surfaces the plugin's intelligence and rendering capabilities, so your preferred agent (even using relatively small local models) can generate correct diagrams, even the newest or more obscure ones with ease.
https://mermaidstudio.dev/ | https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/29870-mermaid-studio
Tinkering with several other IntelliJ plugin ideas that may or may not end up being released.
Still occasionally pushing up new features Tachi Code, my browser extension that brings a feature rich, highly customizable, Monaco Editor based code editor to the browser surfaces you always wished would be less of a pain to read. These days, I mostly use it for reading and printing Markdown files.
https://tachicode.com/