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I've worked with documentation auto-generators before, and the problem they have is that they can't figure out which references are relevant and which aren't. I remember auto-generating a class diagram of a Java project in the late 90's and it showed every class having a reference to the class "java.lang.String". Generators have gotten (a little) smarter with one-off heuristics like "treat the class String as if it were a primitive", but they're still way more cluttered than a knowledgeable human would ever come up with.



What we do with appmap.io is to depict only your own code and not dependencies. Also, each diagram depicts a runtime trace and not just static imports. It produces a more focused diagram, and it also clearly illuminates factors like HTTP client and server requests, and SQL, that static analysis can’t see. The data can be depicted as a dependency map, sequence diagram, detailed trace, and flame graph.




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