An Indian student's image-generation Skill got 400 stars from two Chinese tweets: SeeCode, in the crowded "AI diagramming" track

SeeCode is a diagramming Skill you install into Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor. Say one sentence and get a diagram that's animated, clickable, and exportable as GIF and MP4. It gained 35 stars in 887 days, roughly half from two Chinese tweets. The author's own English tweets got only two or three hundred views each. That's not many stars, and the leading project in the same track has 90K stars. What's worth studying is how it got them: an English-world developer nobody knew, cold-started through the Chinese developer community.

A 25-second video of a food delivery architecture diagram

On Oct 12, 2026 at 7:17 (Beijing time), programmer Yupi posted on X:

I'm amazed, I found another amazing AI diagramming tool! Draw an architecture diagram, drag boxes and connect lines for ages, and in the end it's just a static picture? Install this open source Skill, "SeeCode," into Claude Code or Codex, say one sentence, and the AI draws a diagram that moves on its own... The Chinese text in the diagram is neatly typeset too, and the whole thing can be exported directly as GIF and MP4! Friends writing technical proposals or presentation slides, bookmark this~

The tweet came with a 25-second video: an architecture diagram of a food delivery order. The mouse hovers over the "Order Service," only its upstream and downstream light up, and a click opens the details. The tweet got 9,018 views, 110 likes, and 112 bookmarks (X, 11-06). More bookmarks than likes suggests viewers planned to come back to it. The next day SeeCode gained 227 stars, its biggest single-day gain to date (GitHub stars, 10-13).

Four days later, on Oct 16 at 8 PM, GitHubDaily posted a second tweet. It opened with "Explaining to a colleague how a system runs, I drew an architecture diagram, but with so many arrows they still couldn't tell which request goes first" and then specifically mentioned "say 'draw an office chair' and it breaks it into parts with labels" and "Chinese labels also wrap automatically." This one got 24.1K views and 347 likes. Over the next two days SeeCode gained another 145 stars.

By then, the author Aryan Utkarsh had posted three introductory tweets on X himself, each with two or three hundred views.

What it is

In one sentence: let the AI write "what's in the diagram and how it's connected," and hand the drawing itself to a program.

The model writes only a JSON file of 30 to 150 lines, specifying the boxes, what connects to what, and roughly where they sit. Layout, routing, avoiding overlaps, and animation are handled by a fixed renderer, which outputs a single HTML file. The author says such a diagram costs about 1,400 tokens, while having the model hand-write SVG would take 15,000 and tends to come out messy.

The output can do three things static diagrams can't: hover to highlight one path; click two nodes and watch a request hop along the route; play a sequence diagram message by message, or have bar charts grow on their own. The page has an export menu with PNG, SVG, GIF, and MP4. There are 45 diagram types in all: architecture, sequence, Gantt, Sankey, Wardley maps, plus isometric 3D exploded views. You can also import old diagrams from Mermaid, draw.io, Excalidraw, PlantUML, and D2 and turn them into animations. MIT license, free, no paid tier.

When the repo was created on Oct 2, the first commit was already a complete product: 42 diagram types, import, export, brand themes, and CI, with the commit message "My first open source Project!" The README has a GIF for each diagram type.

Why it took off that week

The whole track blew up in the same week. On Oct 12 and 13, diagram-design gained 2,038 stars in a single day and anatomy gained 3,372 (GitHub stars), while Chinese developer circles were densely posting about "amazing diagram tools" those days. SeeCode got carried along with that wave.

It followed the trend the day after it appeared. anatomy launched on Oct 8, focused on isometric 3D machine exploded views. SeeCode added isometric objects, exploded views, and isometric floor plans on Oct 9, and its README uses an office chair, a phone teardown, and a hamburger as examples. Two Chinese tweets later specifically mentioned "draw an office chair." I don't know whether it was a deliberate follow, but the timing matched.

It paid specific attention to Chinese. Commits the same day (10-09) included "Wrap CJK labels between characters" and "Add everyday examples, two in Chinese" (renting an apartment and job hunting). English projects rarely do this. The Yupi tweet specifically praised that "the Chinese text is neatly typeset."

The demo itself is a ready-to-post video. The diagram moves, and you can export MP4 in one click, so repost accounts don't have to edit anything. Recording a clip is enough to post it, and the cost of spreading it is nearly zero.

The two tweets together explain about 400 stars. The rest came from a longer tail: Sina, XNews, the Juejin GitHub weekly chart (11-01), the Yunzhan community (11-02, whose copy clearly lifted GitHubDaily's wording), a long post on lininn.cn (11-03), and a pile of Skill directory sites. From October 23 to 31 it barely grew (710 → 740), then from Nov 1 it gained 14 to 42 stars a day, reaching 11-06 by 887. I couldn't find who drove the second wave. My guess is a WeChat Official Account or a Xiaohongshu repost *(inference)*.

On the English side there's almost nothing: no Hacker News, Reddit, or Product Hunt mentions turned up, and there's only one explainer video on English YouTube with 272 views. On Oct 8 the author replied twice with his link under a 366K-view English viral tweet (2,648 and 1,507 views), and by the next day it had only 92 stars.

Who it's competing with

Many, and far larger. "Have a coding agent draw diagrams" is one of the most crowded categories in the Skill ecosystem in 2026 (GitHub stars, 11-06):

The "animated architecture diagram Skill" category alone has at least 8 projects, plus a few like dashmotion, Archscribe, and anidiagram with only tens to hundreds of stars. SeeCode ranks second in this small category, but it trails archify and diagram-design by two orders of magnitude. I didn't see anyone copying it; during the same period these look more like parallel independent efforts.

One caveat: even in a crowded track, new projects keep emerging. floorplan and stack-diagram both launched after late October and gained two or three thousand stars within days. They won by being narrow and easy to describe in one sentence ("codebase map," "architecture diagram with logos"), not by being yet another "draws anything" tool.

If it were you

One judgment: copying SeeCode to build another "animated diagram Skill that draws anything" isn't worth it, since that path already has a leader at 90K stars and seven or eight similar projects. What's worth learning is its cold-start playbook, applied to your own project.

Who it suits: developers who already have a well-built open source project or Skill that nobody in the English world knows about, and who are willing to do extra work for Chinese users (Chinese typesetting, Chinese examples).

Who it doesn't suit: people hoping to reach tens of thousands of stars just by picking "general diagramming" as the topic. The topic is already taken, and even SeeCode, this complete, only got 887.

How to do it:

• If you do build a diagram tool, pick a narrow scenario you can explain in one sentence: animating a PR, showing before-and-after for a database migration, mapping an outage chain for ops, or showing non-technical people "where the salary goes." floorplan and stack-diagram show that narrow topics can still take off.
• Having the model write only semantics while deterministic code handles rendering is a division of labor worth copying, and it makes a good technical story ("1,400 tokens vs. 15,000").
• Ship a complete product on day one, with an animated GIF for every feature in the README and a one-line install command at the top.

How to get users:

• Make the demo something repost accounts can post directly: a 20 to 30-second video or GIF, ideally one exported straight from the product itself.
• Localize it for Chinese devs, then get Chinese dev accounts to repost it. Accounts like 程序员鱼皮 and GitHubDaily can add 100–200 stars with a single post. For an indie dev with no English following, this works far better than posting in English yourself.
• Watch the hit products in the same category. Catch the week's hottest trick within 24 hours, before KOLs publish their "best tools" roundups.
• Replying with your own link under English hit-product posts costs nothing and does almost nothing. You can try it, but don't count on it.

When was the window: the drawing Skill's heat peaked in mid-October, and KOLs had already published their "drawing tools" roundups. To ride this topic, do it before year-end. The cold-start playbook itself doesn't expire.

What would show you read it wrong: if over the next month or two another general-purpose animated drawing Skill grows from zero to 10,000+ stars, the topic isn't saturated and the general route still works. If you localize it, get repost accounts, and one post only brings in a few dozen stars, Chinese dev circles are tired of "yet another AI tool" and this cold-start path needs to change.