My main use cases are a) when I'm toying with some higher-level design in my head and want to "see it" in picture form, and b) when making notes about the structure of code as I explore gnarly areas of a legacy codebase. I mostly use PlantUML for myself, in lieu of drawing diagrams by hand (or pointing device). Yup, mostly the same set of PlantUML diagrams for me, plus: You can find some uses-cases of those diagrams here (. I try to follow UML, but I don't care about machine readability and prefer readability over UML compliance. I use them to model simplified class diagrams for documentation purposes, to model data flows, to create primitive mockups, to show the relationship between UI components (as embedded screenshots) and to show component dependencies. Especially as PRs changing the code structure can include diagram changes at the same time. After moving diagrams closer to code, I noticed that it is much easier to keep them in sync with the code base.
There is also an extension for IntelliJ and the diagrams work nicely in github readme files. Since I created a drawio integration extension for VS Code, I tend to create much more diagrams during coding, as they are really cheap to create. I use drawio, as those diagrams are quite future proof (drawio is open source, very old and you can embed diagrams in svg files) but also very expressive (you can even use latex inside drawio diagrams).
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