However You Explain It
Say it in your own words, or hand over the spec — the parts, what connects to what, and what flows between them come out as a drawn diagram.
A block diagram held to one level — no service sitting next to a function, which is where these usually stop being readable.
A block diagram is read by someone who has to work out what the boxes have in common. Below: what it draws from, what it keeps consistent, and how it handles a system that has outgrown a page.
Say it in your own words, or hand over the spec — the parts, what connects to what, and what flows between them come out as a drawn diagram.
Say what the boxes are this time — services, containers, modules, signals — and the whole page stays there. Anything sitting lower or higher gets raised rather than quietly drawn in.
Boxes get placed so the lines can be followed rather than crossed into a knot, and when the connection count has outgrown one picture you are told that instead of handed a mess.
From a system you can explain out loud to a diagram someone else can read, in three steps.
Say what the parts are and how they connect. A spec, a README, or three paragraphs typed into the box all work.
Name what a box represents this time round. That one decision does more for the diagram's readability than any layout choice.
Read it back against what you meant, especially anything it raised. Save the run as a Playbook so the next version of the system comes back drawn the same way.
Shape libraries and templates solve the drawing. Drawing was not why the last one went unread.
Put a box called "authentication service" beside one called "the retry loop in checkout" and the reader has nothing to hold on to. That is usually where a diagram stops being read, and no canvas will mention it.
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You already know how the system works; that is why you can describe it. The diagram exists for the person who cannot, which makes their reading of it the only test that matters — and it is the test you are least able to run yourself.
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Worth being plain: this works from your description, not your system — it has not seen your codebase. If the model you describe is stale in one corner, the diagram will be confidently wrong in the same corner. Drawing faithfully is not drawing correctly.
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The first one is the expensive one — that is where the level, the vocabulary, and the layout conventions get settled. After that it stays on file and your AllyHub never starts from scratch again, so redrawing after a change gets faster every time.
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Engineers explaining an architecture, pre-sales teams shipping a proposal, teams writing onboarding docs, and anyone laying out how a rig fits together.
Having to explain the architecture happens more often than anyone plans for — a review, a new hire, an incident post-mortem. The diagram gets redrawn on a whiteboard each time and then wiped.
Something goes in the proposal showing how it all fits together, and it is looked at by people who will not read the paragraph underneath it. It carries more weight than its production time usually suggests.
Somebody's first week on the team is spent assembling a picture that three other people already carry in their heads. Writing it down once converts a recurring conversation into a page.
How the rig fits together, what feeds what, where the signal goes — laying out a physical or process system is the same drawing problem, and the same readability rules apply.
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What it draws, what it holds constant, and what it has not seen.
It is a picture of a system where the boxes are the parts and the lines are how they connect or what passes between them. It sits above the detail on purpose — the point is the shape of the whole thing, not how any single part works inside.
Yes. A single diagram runs on the free plan. Bigger systems, holding one set of conventions across a documentation set, and storing the run so redraws match are on the paid plans.
You are told rather than having it drawn in anyway. Then you decide: leave it out, promote the rest to match, or keep it for a second diagram one step down. If the connection count has outgrown one picture, you hear that too.
No. It works from your description or the document you hand it, with no access to a repository, a cloud account, or a running system. That is a real limit worth knowing, because a diagram drawn from a stale mental model will look exactly as authoritative as a correct one.
The others are canvases: shapes, templates, and a blank page, on the assumption that drawing is the work. Here the level is enforced across the whole picture, the arrangement is done for you, and the conventions you settle on carry into the next version. You do get an image rather than an editable board — when a team needs to move boxes around together, a whiteboard is still the right tool.