This chapter covers
- Prototyping potential designs with ChatGPT
- Documenting our architecture in Mermaid
- Completing our design with ChatGPT
Now that we have an intuition about when and how to use Generative AI, we will start to design, explore, and document our application’s architecture. Laying out some of the critical components upfront is beneficial in several ways. For example, it allows us to delegate some of the design to sub-architects or some of the development to other team members. Designing up front will also help us clarify our thinking about the implementation, allowing us to anticipate and avoid some pitfalls. Finally, capturing the design as documentation enables us to justify our crucial design decisions, communicating our intent to our future selves, our stakeholders, and those who may inherit the project.
First, let’s get an overview of the application that we will be designing in this chapter: the information technology asset management (ITAM) system. We’ll build out key features in subsequent chapters.