Architecture examples

A starter fills a blank canvas with a composed, editable architecture: real shapes and connectors, each connector's meaning derived from the same rules as anything you draw by hand, usually with a flow or two already defined. Nothing marks the result as "from a starter"; it is your diagram from the first edit.

Five are offered wherever you start a diagram (the home screen, a blank canvas, the desktop app's Home): Monolith, Microservices, Event-Driven, Hexagonal and CQRS. They were chosen for how much they teach and how easily each is adapted, one of each shape a first diagram tends to take, and the set is deliberately small.

The rest of the catalog is reachable by name: open a canvas, press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux), type part of the name, and press Enter. An AI agent connected to the desktop app can start from any of them too (create_diagram with starter, see Agent integration).

Starter	Group	What it draws
Monolith	Architectures	One application, built and deployed as a unit: API, business logic and data access layers over one store
Modular Monolith	Architectures	One deployable, explicitly encapsulated modules inside
Microservices	Architectures	Independently deployed services, each owning its data, behind a gateway
Event-Driven	Architectures	Pub/sub: a topic fanning out to per-subscriber queues, workers and one dead-letter queue
Hexagonal	Architectures	Adapters around a core that owns its ports
Backend for Frontend	Architectures	A backend per frontend, over shared capabilities
CQRS	Architectures	Distinct command and query paths, with an asynchronous read projection
Medallion	Data Architectures	Refine raw data into validated, business-ready datasets
Kappa	Data Architectures	Process live and historical data through one durable stream
Change Data Capture	Data Architectures	Capture committed changes once, fan out to derived views
Saga – Orchestration	Patterns	Local transactions and compensation, one coordinator
Saga – Choreography	Patterns	Local transactions chained by events, with no coordinator
Transactional Outbox	Patterns	Persist state and event intent atomically, publish after

The catalog is frozen: these are examples to adapt, not a template library, and a starter is only ever a starting point. Every one lands on the canvas you are on and never replaces what is there. The shapes it creates are ordinary shapes; delete, rename and rewire them as you would anything else, and the connectors keep labelling themselves as you do.

What each one draws#

Every picture below is the starter exactly as it lands, framed with Fit to view (⌘K, then Fit to view); the pictures are regenerated from the app with npx tsx e2e/docs-screenshots.ts.