TALA, the diagram layout engine behind D2, is now open source
The once-paid architecture-diagram algorithm now ships in D2 v0.9.0 under MPL-2.0 — pin nodes, seed for the best result, and feed it LLM-written diagrams.
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Free now, and built into D2
TALA — Terrastruct's AutoLayout Algorithm, until now a paid add-on — is MPL-2.0 licensed and bundled in D2 v0.9.0. Run it with `--layout=tala` locally or in the browser playground; no license key, no separate binary.
Made for architecture, not generic graphs
Where D2's Dagre and ELK engines optimize raw graph flow, TALA weighs symmetry, median distance, and clustering of like nodes — and it can lock coordinates so you pin some boxes while it places the rest, a hybrid layout the other engines can't do.
Turn a prompt into a real architecture diagram
D2 is plain text, so an LLM can emit it and TALA lays it out. Wire Claude or Codex into a docs pipeline this weekend and generate versioned system diagrams from a description — play.d2lang.com is the fastest way to see it.
The catch: it's random, and weak on DAGs
TALA runs three seeds and keeps the best, so output isn't fully deterministic run to run, and it handles long flowing DAGs worse than Dagre/ELK — keep those for pipeline-style graphs. The old standalone TALA repo is now archived read-only.
Elsewhere: DaVinci Resolve gets an MCP server
Blackmagic's Resolve 21.1 shipped a built-in MCP server, letting Claude or ChatGPT agents drive media organization, presets, and batch renders from natural language — the video-editing twin of TALA's text-to-diagram unlock.