diagramming-obsidian

Diagramming Obsidian

A diagram should ARGUE, not display. Structure carries the claim: strip every label out, and a good diagram still says one source fans out to many, many inputs converge, this loop feeds back. A grid of boxes is a failed diagram, and no amount of labelling repairs it.

DESIGN → BUILD → VALIDATE → SAVE, and you own all four. Two layers run through every phase: HARD is mechanical — the tools verify it, or violating it silently corrupts the output — and SOFT is judgment about the concept you are drawing.

Running the helpers

The Python helpers ship inside this skill's own references/ directory and every command below runs from there. Its absolute path came with this skill when it loaded, on the line reading Base directory for this skill — resolve references/ against that path, never against the user's working directory.

BASE=<the path from that line>
cd "$BASE/references" && uv run python <helper> ...
# a missing dependency is first-run setup, not a defect:
cd "$BASE/references" && uv sync && uv run playwright install chromium

HARD — process invariants

Detect the theme before building anything. The wrong palette silently yields an unreadable diagram — dark colors on a light canvas wash out, light on dark go near-invisible — and the renderer will happily produce it with no feedback.

obsidian eval code="document.body.classList.contains('theme-dark') ? 'dark' : 'light'"

No answer within 5 seconds: pick from prompt signals ("dark mode" in the request, the hour) and state the assumption in your final output. Never assume silently.

Render and view the PNG on every Validate iteration. Composition, readability, and hierarchy are not visible in JSON. The overlap checker finds bounding-box collisions; it cannot see an arrow crossing an unrelated shape at an acute angle, text too small to read, or a hero that fails to dominate. Read /tmp/diagram.png with the Read tool every single iteration.