Hello, 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.
What's next
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.
Non-goals
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.
I still don't see a place for LLMs integrated into diagramming tools. I think
models are smart enough to just look at some examples and then take your specs or
code or whatever you want and turn it into a .d2 file. There doesn't need to be
yet another thinly tuned LLM interface for D2 to provide.
Since D2 is non-profit, we won't be supporting things that need servers. No MCP, no API, no user accounts, no server rendering, no multiplayer. D2 Studio will be purely client-side, usable completely offline.
More soon
That's all for now. I'll be making posts as TALA and D2 Studio are released.
Thank you to everyone who has engaged with us over the years, and especially those who paid for the closed-source parts of it to fund its development. I'm glad D2 has resonated with so many people and I still stumble upon it in blogs and projects and mentions on the public internet and internal company channels. It's always a leap of faith to adopt some new language with unknown motives and continuity. I'm really happy about this direction for D2 and that the value of this excellent IDE and layout algorithm can be shared with more people. I'm excited for what's next.
If you'd like to donate to D2, please see this page on how to do so and what the fund is used for.