// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
D2 Is Non-Profit
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
alex@d2lang.com. 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.
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.
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.