Using ChatGPT to build System Diagrams — Part I

Interested in Mindmaps — read our blog post on using plantUML with ChatGPT to create awesome Mindmaps

The popularity of ChatGPT keeps growing and it’s now being used in a wide range of applications. As a software architect, I had the opportunity to explore ChatGPT’s capabilities for use within the financial domain, specifically for Wealth Management.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

I wanted to confirm if ChatGPT could generate diagrams for a use case explanation and analyze multiple factors at the same time.

So, I logged into chat.openai.com and here is my conversation

Step 1: Let’s define the use-case

I could have defined my own use-case, but I wanted to test all aspects of ChatGPT, so I asked it to define one for me.

Use case definition

Step 2: Let’s define a Data Model for the use-case

Looks good to me, let’s start by defining the data model — so I asked ChatGPT to do it and this is what I got

data model definition

That sounds about right, lets see what it can do for diagrams. I wanted to drill a bit deeper on the data model so my next prompt was

Prompt: describe the data model in more detail or tabular format using markdown
ChatGPT: I can describe the structure of the data model in a tabular format using markdown.

data structure

This is a good start. Next I asked for defining relationships

Step 3: Let’s define relationships — Entity Relationship Diagram

Prompt: this is perfect, I would like to depict the relationships in a mermaid diagram, can you give me the markdown code to do this
ChatGPT: I apologize, but as a text-based model, I am not able to generate Mermaid diagrams or any other visual diagrams. However, I can provide you with an example of…