Prompting guide: formats, speed, cost and models

[alderg]

This guide is now part of the draw.io documentation:

Write prompts for diagrams in AI assistants

All guides: Set up draw.io in your AI assistant · Diagram viewer · Write prompts · Diagram types and examples · Change and style diagrams · Gallery · Install options and output formats

Questions, ideas and examples of your own are welcome here in the Discussions.

[wangjun1892600-dev]

For topology diagrams, one pattern that works well is to separate structure from styling:

1. devices and roles
2. zones / VLANs / trust boundaries
3. links and traffic paths
4. HA / failover / admin / logging paths
5. what should remain editable after generation

Example sanitized input:

"Branch office with ISP1, ISP2, dual-WAN firewall, core switch, user VLAN, server VLAN, guest Wi-Fi VLAN, site-to-site VPN to HQ, monitoring/logging, and primary/failover traffic paths. Group by trust zone."

The benchmark I would use is not whether the output is the prettiest diagram. It is whether a network reviewer can inspect zones, links, and traffic direction without redrawing from zero.

[alderg]

Cleaning up a rich-mode layout

When the AI hand-places a rich-mode (draw.io) diagram, the arrangement can come out a little untidy. Two different clean-ups are available — just ask in plain words:

Re-arrange the boxes — moves everything into a clean, evenly-spaced layout. Best for flowcharts, trees, and hierarchies:

"Tidy up the layout."
"Arrange this top-to-bottom." / "…left-to-right."

Just fix the connectors — leaves your boxes where they are and redraws the lines so they run in clean right angles around the boxes instead of cutting across them. Best when the placement is fine but the wiring is messy:

"Route the connectors around the boxes."
"Make the lines avoid the shapes, keep the layout."

You can ask for either — pick re-arrange when the whole layout is off, or fix-the-connectors when only the lines are messy. (Quick-mode diagrams are already auto-arranged, so this only applies to rich mode.)

Under the hood these are the ELK layout and libavoid routing engines, but you never need to name them — plain language works.