Excalidraw Architect MCP for AI Based IDEs

Hey Folks, I've been building an MCP server that generates beautiful Excalidraw architecture diagrams fully auto-laid-out, no manual positioning. It's open source, works with any AI IDE (Cursor, Windsurf, etc.).I wanted to share it early because the core layout engine is solid and already producing clean diagrams.

What Problem Am I Solving? AI IDEs generate architecture diagrams as Mermaid or ASCII art. When they attempt Excalidraw, they hallucinate coordinates and boxes overlap, arrows cross through nodes, and you spend more time fixing the diagram than drawing it yourself. LLMs understand what a system looks like, but they have zero intuition for where things go on a 2D canvas.

How Does This MCP Solve It? You describe the components and connections. The MCP runs a Sugiyama hierarchical layout algorithm to compute positions deterministically -- the AI never touches coordinates. It auto-styles 50+ technologies (say "Kafka" and get a stream-styled node), stretches hub nodes like API Gateways to span their services, and routes arrows around obstacles. The result is a clean .excalidraw file in seconds, with stateful editing so you can say "add a Redis cache" without starting over.

Why Not the Official excalidraw-mcp? The official MCP gives the AI a raw canvas and lets it place elements freely -- great for general sketching, but architecture diagrams still end up with overlapping boxes. excalidraw-architect-mcp takes a structured graph as input and runs a proper layout algorithm, so every diagram is overlap-free by design. It also runs fully offline in your IDE with no API keys, outputs version-controllable .excalidraw files, and includes architecture-aware styling that the general-purpose tool doesn't have.

What's the Future? Diagram-from-code (point at a codebase, get an architecture diagram automatically), live sync so diagrams update as code evolves, richer layouts (radial, swimlane, grid), and an expanded component library covering cloud-provider icons and CI/CD tools. The goal: architecture diagrams as a byproduct of building software, not a separate task.