Chinilla
Design systems, simulate them and watch where they break
Chinilla launched on April 16, 2026 with 110 votes, #361 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
What it does
Like a flight simulator for systems. Drag components, wire them together, hit play, and watch real traffic flow through your system. See queues fill up, databases choke, and bottlenecks form in real time. Scrub a timeline to inspect any moment. Fix what breaks, run it again. That's how you go from knowing patterns to understanding systems. Export to PNG, Mermaid, or Python for your docs and repos. 7 blocks, 12 behaviors, AI that turns code or prompts into live diagrams. Free in your browser.
Drag in services, queues, and databases. Wire them up. Watch real packets flow through your design and see exactly where it breaks under load. Free forever, no credit card. Pro $20/mo adds AI design and GitHub repo to diagram.
Turn your ideas into system diagrams. Simulate how they behave, understand what breaks. The IDE feels like a whiteboard. The runtime feels like a real system. Three steps from blank canvas to running simulation. Person, Step, Storage, Decision, Trigger, Tool, Channel. The full vocabulary. Attach 8 modes per node: retry, circuit breaker, batch, replicate, plus universal queueing on any component. Deterministic discrete-event engine. Same design + same seed = same result, every time. Sketch a real system. Run packets through it. Watch the bottleneck show up before you write a line of code. Share a link. Same canvas, live cursors, two heads. Flip to interview mode for a mock round with a…from chinilla.com
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