Every engineering team draws an architecture diagram on a whiteboard once a quarter. The diagram is wrong before the photo of the whiteboard reaches Slack. By the next quarter it is fiction.
This is not a discipline problem. Architecture documentation drifts because the system it describes changes faster than humans can keep up. A migration ships, a service gets renamed, a queue is added between two components that used to talk directly, and the diagram in Confluence stays exactly the same as it was the day someone drew it.
The cost is real. Pull requests ship with hidden blast radius, because the author and the reviewer share the same wrong picture. Migrations stall on dependencies that nobody remembered. Incidents take longer than they should because the on-call has to rebuild the graph in their head from grep and intuition.
The source already knows
The thing every drifted diagram has in common is that the source code, unlike the diagram, is correct. Your services know which databases they connect to. Your HTTP clients know which other services they call. Your queue producers know which topics they publish on. Your infrastructure-as-code knows which buckets and tables exist.
The map is in the code. The job of an architecture tool is to read it.
What we are building
DriftMap reads source. It detects more than two dozen edge types straight from your repositories: HTTP and gRPC calls, message-bus producers and consumers, database access, shared library imports, Kubernetes manifests, IaC resources. The output is a topology graph that updates when the code updates, because the code is the source of truth.
No manual catalog entries to keep in sync. The graph updates when the code updates, because the code is what the graph reflects.
What is next
We are in early access. If you want to see your topology before we open up self-serve, get in touch. Tell us your stack, your team size, and what you would want from a source-derived architecture map. We will get back to you.