Who’s behind this

Hi, I’m Olexiy — a student who got so sick of drawing flowcharts by hand that I ended up making them draw themselves. I built rombik for myself first, then found out half the country suffers from the same thing. So a student’s project, made for students, grew into a service.

Where it grew from

In the winter of 2026 I wrote my own little programming language — piton. Ukrainian in transliteration, with a hand-written parser and interpreter that answered an error not with a dry traceback but like a nitpicking instructor: “I’m the interpreter here, I know how it’s supposed to be.” Half a joke, half a real tool — but with one serious feature: piton could draw flowcharts straight from the code, by itself. Properly, you draw the chart first and write the code from it — but it hit me: if a student is already past needing a chart to understand code, and writes the code first, then let the charts be generated from the code, not the other way around.

The same pain

A familiar story: the code works, it feels done — but the assignment isn’t, because it still needs a standard-compliant flowchart. And here’s the paradox that broke me: my instructor would spend two minutes reading my handwritten code line by line to grasp what it does — then reject the flowchart in a second if a single arrow or label wasn’t to standard. The chart was the one place where absolutely everything had to be perfect. I was making coursework and labs not just for myself but for half the class, and kept hitting the same wall — hours of busywork just so “the diamond is to spec.”

Why rombik, not piton

piton drew its charts through D2, a ready-made engine — writing my own layout math felt too scary back then. But while doing coursework in Typst, which needs piles of charts, something else got to me: AI generators kept handing me a slightly different, slightly wrong chart every time, one I had to fix by hand. I wanted determinism. I knew SVG is essentially just plain text under the hood, so instead of D2 I built my own code→SVG engine — for SVG first, then the other formats. 6 months of the whole journey, 3 months of it as rombik itself.

What I believe

Three things the project stands on. Determinism: among hundreds of AI chart generators, rombik is algorithmic — the same program always yields the same clean, standard-compliant chart, no surprises at 3 a.m. before a deadline. Nativeness and editability: you get real Word / Visio / Excalidraw shapes you can keep editing, not a dead image. And accessibility: the basic preview is free forever — if you just need to copy the chart into your notebook, do it for free. I deliberately kept the core open.

Where it’s going

Next: more languages, Nassi-Shneiderman structograms, support for whole groups and departments, and reaching beyond Ukraine through the international ISO 5807 standard. But the core won’t change: I don’t want people spending the time they could use to actually learn to program on drawing little charts — that might get rejected anyway. Less manual busywork, more time for what truly teaches.

Honest and transparent

Developer: Олексій Одарчук (ishawyha) · [email protected]