Mermaid diagrams are great because they are plain text, live with the code, and work well in Git. Writing the syntax gets tedious once a diagram becomes large.
So I built FlowForge, a visual Mermaid editor for VS Code.
Open an .mmd file and you get a canvas, Mermaid source, and a live preview. Drag nodes, draw connections, and edit labels visually. The three views stay in sync, but the file remains a normal Mermaid file that works with other tools.
I built this because I think diagrams can make spec driven development more practical. A system model can stay close to the original human intent, while still giving agentic tools a clear, structured spec to work from. For complex systems, that is often faster than trying to explain everything in a long document or a chat prompt.
I am still improving connection routing, text editing, clearer flowchart arrows, and support for more diagram types.
Flowforge is now available in the VS Code Marketplace:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sauliusd3v.flowforge
It is open source under the MIT license. Source: https://github.com/SauliusDev/flowforge

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