What in the World Have I Done?

Let me start with a confession: I built a modeling tool. From scratch. On purpose. While fully aware that sensible people do not do this.

There was a moment — somewhere between the third coffee and the fourth "wait, why doesn't this exist already?" — where I looked at what I was doing and thought, in the calm, measured way of someone watching their own questionable decisions in real time: what in the world have I done?

This post is me answering that question. Mostly for you. A little bit for me.

The itch

Here's the thing that started it. I love modeling with diagrams. I've drawn approximately one billion of them. Boxes, arrows, the works. And every single time, the same quiet frustration: a diagram is a picture of an idea, but it doesn't actually know anything.

Draw a box labelled "Orders System." Draw an arrow to "Customer Database." Lovely. Now — what kind of thing is that box? What kind of arrow is that? Is that connection even allowed? What happens when you have two hundred of these spread across forty diagrams and someone asks, "show me everything that touches customer data"? You're squinting at pictures and praying.

The tools that do know things — the serious, formal modeling platforms — tend to be expensive, proprietary, locked-down, and roughly as joyful to use as filing a tax return in a language you don't speak. You buy the big box, you learn the big notation they decided you'd use, and your models live forever inside their walls.

I wanted the structure of the serious tools and the freedom of a blank page. It turned out nobody was giving us exactly that. So. You can see where this is going.

What Farkitect actually is

Farkitect lets you build structured, visual models backed by real data — not just drawings.

You define the types of things you care about, how they're allowed to connect, and what properties they carry. Then you model with them, and the tool actually understands what you've built. It can check that your relationships make sense. It can give you sortable, filterable catalogs of everything in your model. It can show you what's connected to what.

The trick under the hood is that Farkitect is notation-agnostic. It doesn't have one opinion about how you should model the world baked into it. Instead, you pick a framework you like — ArchiMate, C4, a data-modeling notation, whatever — and use it, extend it, or invent your own from scratch. Enterprise architecture today, a data model tomorrow, your own bizarre domain-specific notation on the weekend. Same tool, your rules.

If you know the jargon: it's built on a proper four-layer metamodeling foundation, so "the notation" and "your model" are different layers and you can change either. If you don't know the jargon: it means the thing is flexible in a way that usually requires a research grant. Welcome to Farkitecture.

The part I'm quietly proud of

Two decisions I'd make again in a heartbeat:

Your models are yours. Every model you build exports to a .farki file, which is just plain, human-readable JSON. No binary blobs. No secret format. No lock-in. Open one in a text editor and you can read exactly what you've got. Don't like something? Edit it. Want to do something unhinged with it? Throw it at your favourite LLM and watch what happens — the format was designed to be as friendly to a language model as it is to a human. (We may have built this slightly with the future in mind.)

It's meant to be fun. Yes, this is a formal modeling tool with real semantics and constraint checking and a metamodel engine. It also has a thing called the Farketplace, because the jokes practically write themselves and I am weak. Serious foundations, light heart. I refuse to believe those are mutually exclusive.

The dish

Farkitect is early. Genuinely early. There are rough edges, missing features, and at least one thing that will make you tilt your head and go "huh." I'm not going to pretend otherwise — and that, by the way, is exactly why it's free right now. (Free until we run out of beer, roughly. We're optimistic about the beer.)

What I need isn't applause. I need to know whether this thing is actually useful to anyone who isn't me. Are we mad? Are we geniuses? Are we comfortably, gloriously average? I genuinely cannot tell from in here. So if you try it and something delights you, tell me. If something infuriates you, definitely tell me. The fastest way to make Farkitect good is for real people to use it and not be polite about it.

So… what have I done?

I think I've built the modeling tool I always wished existed: structured but not stuffy, formal but not a fortress, powerful but — and this is the part I care about — actually pleasant to sit down with. Whether that's a stroke of genius or an elaborate way to avoid sensible work, I'll find out the same way you will.

If you want to skip the philosophy and just go, head to the Farketplace, grab a starter kit, and start modeling like a hero. There's a whole fictional yacht company in there waiting to be modeled. (Long story. Great yachts.)

Thanks for being here at the very beginning. It's going to be a bit of a ride, and I'm thrilled you're along for it.

Please try it!