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AI and DFD System Design
Explore turning text requirements into Data Flow Diagrams using LLMs and manual methods, revealing the persistent challenges in system design visualization.
After nearly two decades of building systems, I can tell you that Data Flow Diagrams or Level 0 diagrams only look simple—until you sit down to draw one.
Teams wrestle with fuzzy boundaries, missing actors, and those never-ending debates about which way the arrows should actually go.
Most system descriptions aren’t written with diagrams in mind, so turning text into flows often feels like educated guesswork.
The tooling doesn’t always help either—manual tools are clunky, and semantic tools regularly miss the nuances that matter.
In this talk, I’ll walk through the different approaches I tried, the LLMs I experimented with, the test cases I built, and why—even after all that—I still don’t have a perfect solution and sometimes end up back at the manual method.