Rhizz — Rhizomatic Systems Engineering

Rhizz strives to be an actually useful architecture tool for software architects. Express high-level system concepts as code and validate them with a compiler accepting different levels of precision, from a business-level description, all the way to a byte-by-byte interface definition.

In other words - a code-first MBSE tool.

Core Ideas

Code-first modeling — components, interfaces, and messages live in plain HCL (same syntax as Terraform). All .hcl files in a directory are merged into one model, so you can split the description across as many files as you like.

Completion score — rhizz score measures how fully a system is decomposed. Sketch a high-level architecture first, fill in details over time, and track progress numerically:

Components:  8/12 complete  (66.7%)
Interfaces:  3/7  complete  (42.9%)
Messages:    5/10 complete  (50.0%)
Overall:     16/29           55.2%

Definable views — view blocks define filtered perspectives on the same model, rendered by the web application. Show only power paths, zoom into one subsystem, or hide low-level wiring for a stakeholder review — all without touching the model itself:

view "power-paths" {
  system = "quadcopter"
  filter { include_tags = ["power"]; show_messages = false }
}

CLI

rhizz check [path]   # parse and validate
rhizz score [path]   # print completion report
rhizz build [path]   # check + score (default)

See SPEC.md, SPEC/, and examples/ for the full specification and worked examples.

Server

rhizz-server is a standalone HTTP server (axum) that serves the compiled web editor and persists the frontend's virtual filesystem:

rhizz-server                  # serves UI on 127.0.0.1:3000

The frontend persists to the server when built with VITE_RHIZZ_SERVER_URL set (otherwise it runs fully in the browser via localStorage):

VITE_RHIZZ_SERVER_URL=http://localhost:3000 just build

Environment variables:

Variable	Default	Meaning
RHIZZ_ADDR	127.0.0.1:3000	Listen address
RHIZZ_DATA_DIR	./rhizz-data	Where per-project VFS dumps are stored
RUST_LOG	info	tracing log level (debug, warn, ...)

No authentication is implemented — the server assumes a public, trusted environment.

Concurrency: the VFS persistence API is a read-modify-write of the whole blob with no locking or revision check. Two clients editing the same project concurrently will silently overwrite each other (last write wins). This is an accepted limitation for the current MVP stage; a revision/ETag check is planned before multi-user use.

Development commands

See the Justfile.

Links

• WASM Bindgen Guide - search engines are not finding it for some reason...