KHOWD is a visual language for software architecture. Typed nodes placed in three-dimensional space, joined by a small set of verbs. The same drawing reads three ways: as a system to a founder, as a spatial design to a designer, as a build specification to an engineer. Nobody has to read a line of code to understand it.
The renderer, running live. Nine primitives, ten connections, KHOWD’s own grammar. Drag to orbit, click a node to read it, pinch or ⌘ scroll to zoom.
So the conversations that decide how their company is built happen in a language they cannot read. KHOWD moves those conversations into a form everyone at the table can hold: the diagram is the source, and the code is its translation.
The test: a founder reads a KHOWD diagram and understands the system, what it is, how it flows, what depends on what, without reading a line of code.
Left is where a request enters, right is the outcome. Reading across is reading what happens.
Up is the surface people touch, down is the foundation and the data. Height is how close to the human.
Front is the critical path, back is what supports it. Orbiting the scene reveals what leans on what.
Shape encodes type and is never reassigned. Once you know the nine, you can read any system drawn in KHOWD.
What the human touches: frontends and interfaces.
Where work happens: servers, logic, functions.
Where state lives: databases and stores.
Controls passage: gateways and load balancers.
An asynchronous channel: queues, pub/sub, streams.
Verifies and protects: authentication, tokens, firewalls.
Speeds delivery: CDN, cache, edge.
Watches only: logging, metrics, tracing. Always off the flow.
A non-human trigger: cron, scheduler, timer.
The colour law: the viewport and all chrome are colourless. The only saturated colour in a scene encodes a domain. Violet is security only, red is fault only, grey is observation only.
Nodes are joined by verbs, not arrows. Line weight carries throughput and the speed of the particles carries latency, so a glance shows where the pressure is.
The caller waits: a synchronous request and response.
Fire and forget: an asynchronous event nobody waits for.
Structure only: a dependency with no live data.
Trusted traffic, downstream of a WARD.
One source, many listeners: publish and subscribe.
Live in both directions: a WebSocket.
The unhappy path: an error or fallback. Red means this and nothing else.
The lit flow path dominates. Observation hides. External services are labelled by name, so it is clear what you own and what you rent.
Membranes and the system perimeter come forward. Flow dims to context, so structure and grouping can be judged at a glance.
Every type, every protocol, the whole observation layer revealed. The same drawing, now read as a build.
Each phase is finished and locked before the next begins. Nothing below is claimed before it runs.
Nine primitives, seven verbs, the colour law, the Heat system, three readings.
Its own architecture mapped in its own grammar, every primitive exercised.
All nine primitives in 3D, animated connections, orbit and select. It is running above.
Any architecture described as data, rendered without touching geometry.
The three axes built into navigation, focus mode, depth atmosphere.
Founder, Designer and Engineer emphasis inside the 3D scene.
Place, drag and connect nodes. Draw your own system.
Images, shareable links and generated documentation.
Every builder keeps a private stack of commands they run again and again. The KHOWD library holds them: paste a command, and KHOWD highlights it, names it, files it by family and by the system it touches, and keeps it on the device it was saved on.
The library is in private use by its founder and opens to others later.
Owner sign-inKHOWD is also a word: the weight that precedes the word. Read it here.