GoKawiilHello, I'm happy to share the news that D2 is now fiscally sponsored by Hack Club!
The project was born and thus far developed as an open-core arm of a for-profit company. The development of open-source D2 was funded by the closed-source IDE (D2 Studio) and proprietary layout algorithm (TALA). The company is shutting down, and D2 will continue as an independent, completely open-source, non-profit project through Hack Club.
I will continue to maintain and improve D2. But my time commitment will be limited. It's not my primary focus anymore, but I remain committed to its continued development and am excited for the roadmap ahead. If you have interest in becoming a maintainer, please email me at [email protected]. High-quality maintenance and contributions may be invited to enter into a paid contributor contract, funded by donations to the non-profit. This would be ideal for a driven early-careerist with open-source experience.
D2 thus far has been a product of handcrafted code. That era is over. This next phase of D2 will be driven by AI. By this, I mean that all of my contributions will use AI. I welcome AI contributions and will use AI to review your AI, etc. The exception is writing -- I will author all blog posts and comms without AI.
In this manner, D2 will evolve at a rate that is orders of magnitude faster than it has. Models will find ways to squeeze every millisecond of performance in a way I could not. It'll make into reality the features that were daydreams pre-AI because of limited engineering bandwidth, e.g. an isometric renderer, transpilers from other diagramming languages, etc.
If you've invested a tiny part of your stack into D2, I hope this is received with optimism more than concern. I wrote code ~every day for 10+ years, and have not written any in the past year even though I'm working with software every day. I know where the limitations are and have no intention of the project devolving into slop.
I of course know this is somewhat controversial and has downsides, and I'm not recommending anything to anyone; I just wanted to be transparent about my plans to the community and those who rely on D2.
Some top of mind goals:
Get rendering support from popular platforms Natively integrated onto GitHub, Notion, Linear, etc. Cut a stable 1.0 with formalized grammar/featureset Be the most powerful harness for agents They're really good at making almost-perfect diagrams, but it's still too non-deterministic, uncustomizable, imprecise, etc. I think that'll last the foreseeable future, so you still want some text-based source to back the artifact. Kind of like HTML for web pages instead of drawing every pixel.
I want to avoid bloat. To be clear, just because AI will allow me to make a Swiss Army knife of a diagramming tool, I'd much rather spend the tokens on depth and quality of a small, curated feature set. I'll want to add some plugin/module system to easily add on things that don't belong in D2 core. For example, I still plan for D2 to focus on the software architecture diagram use case and won't be adding e.g. Venn diagrams, even if it'd be trivial to do so.
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