Archify setup, explained.

Transcript

If you have ever tried to explain a codebase to a teammate with nothing but a wall of text, there is a new tool worth five minutes of your time. It is called Archify, and it just landed on GitHub's daily trending page with over a thousand stars added in a single day, on top of more than seventeen thousand total. Here is what makes it different from just asking an AI to sketch you a diagram. Archify is not a drawing tool by itself. It is a skill that plugs into an AI coding agent you probably already use, like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, or opencode. When you ask for a diagram, your agent hands the request to Archify, which builds a typed JSON description of the system, runs it through validation, and only then writes out a finished HTML file. If a diagram fails that check, your last good version stays exactly where it was. Getting started takes one command in your terminal: npx skills add, then the repository name, with a global flag. That works the same way on Windows, macOS, and Linux, because the whole thing runs on Node.js. Once it is installed, you do not run a separate command to generate anything. You just talk to your agent. Ask it to analyze your repository and use Archify to create a high level runtime architecture diagram, telling it how many core components you want to see and what the primary path through the system looks like. Want to poke around first? Archify ships its own command line tool. Run the doctor command to check your setup, or the demo command to generate a sample diagram into a temp folder. There is even a guide command that recommends which diagram type fits what you are trying to explain, whether that is architecture, a workflow, a sequence, a data flow, or a lifecycle. A couple of things worth knowing going in. You do need one of those supported agents already installed, this is not a standalone app. And it deliberately skips being a full design tool: no automatic diagram parsing, no drag and drop editing. If you already live inside Claude Code or Cursor, this is a low risk five minute add that pays off the next time you need to explain a real system to someone else. That's the setup.