I’ve generated a first diagram-based documentation for DeepLabCut to help new users—especially scientists—get up to speed more quickly with the codebase. You can see a preview here: https://github.com/CodeBoarding/GeneratedOnBoardings/blob/main/DeepLabCut/on_boarding.md

The diagrams aim to show the core components of the project and how they interact with each other. As many users are more interested in understanding the high-level flow (rather than reading through all the source code), this should help them navigate the codebase more easily. From the diagrams, one can click into a specific component of interest and explore it in detail—enabling focused exploration while still seeing how everything fits together.

This can be especially useful for:

• Modifying the pipeline for custom applications
• Teaching DeepLabCut in academic settings
• Quickly understanding what each module does without needing to trace function calls

We’ve also released a free GitHub Action that automatically keeps the diagrams updated, so they stay in sync with code changes.

Would love to get your feedback! And happy to chat about how we can support onboarding and collaboration for scientist-developers using DeepLabCut.