Like a flight simulator for systems. Drag components, wire them together, hit play, and watch real traffic flow through your system. See queues fill up, databases choke, and bottlenecks form in real time. Scrub a timeline to inspect any moment. Fix what breaks, run it again. That's how you go from knowing patterns to understanding systems. Export to PNG, Mermaid, or Python for your docs and repos. 7 blocks, 12 behaviors, AI that turns code or prompts into live diagrams. Free in your browser.
I built Chinilla because I wanted a tool to help me understand how systems work. I tried learning through books and guides, but they're jargon heavy and still didn't give me the intuition of actually seeing and understanding systems visually.
So I built a flight simulator for it. You design a system visually, hit play, and watch traffic flow through it in real time. When your database chokes or your queue overflows, you see it happen. You fix it, run it again, and build the kind of intuition you can only get by watching things break.
What you can do:
Drag and drop 7 universal building blocks
Wire components together and define simulatable metrics and behaviors
12 programmable behaviors: queue, retry, filter, batch, rate limit, circuit breaker, and more
Hit play to simulate and watch real packets flow through your architecture
See bottlenecks, drops, and queue pressure as they happen
Scrub a timeline to inspect any moment frame by frame
Describe a system in plain english or paste code or text (frameworks, papers, etc), Chinilla AI maps it out on canvas
Collapse groups, enter subsystems, explore at any level
Find weaknesses with stability analysis, Monte Carlo with SLO targets, and stress testing
Export to PNG, GIF, SVG, Mermaid, Python code, or a markdown spec
Publish a live interactive link with a MD embed for papers or repos
16 templates to learn by doing (ML pipeline, coffee shop, chat app, rate limiter, and more)
It's free to use in your browser. The demo takes about 60 seconds and doesn't need an account: chinilla.com/demo
Free account gets you 5 cloud projects, full simulation, all export formats. No credit card.
Poured a lot of 💖 and time into this project. I'd love to hear from y'all what you think!
What's next:
Team collaboration (shared canvases, real-time cursors)
Fully fleshed out Duolingo style interactive lessons that teach system design step by step
Tighter simulate-fix loop (inline suggestions when things break)
Integrations (import from Terraform, CloudFormation, Docker Compose)
Better UX polish based on your feedback (seriously, tell me what's rough)
Launch special: LAUNCH50 for 50% off Pro monthly (until April 30)!!
Nice product idea and video! Thanks for choosing FocuSee in recording the walkthrough ❤
This is a sharp idea — most teams only discover their system design flaws after deploying to production and watching things break under real load. We went through exactly this scaling our internal automation infrastructure. The simulation-first approach could save a lot of painful debugging. Curious about the learning curve for non-engineering founders who need to spec out systems but aren't deeply technical on the architecture side.
My first thought was that this seems extremely useful for games like satisfactory and factorio! Great work.
To say I'm surprised is to say nothing! Cool idea!
P.s. I'm the only one who didn't get this link to open
About Chinilla on Product Hunt
“Design systems, simulate them and watch where they break”
Chinilla launched on Product Hunt on April 16th, 2026 and earned 108 upvotes and 11 comments, placing #18 on the daily leaderboard. Like a flight simulator for systems. Drag components, wire them together, hit play, and watch real traffic flow through your system. See queues fill up, databases choke, and bottlenecks form in real time. Scrub a timeline to inspect any moment. Fix what breaks, run it again. That's how you go from knowing patterns to understanding systems. Export to PNG, Mermaid, or Python for your docs and repos. 7 blocks, 12 behaviors, AI that turns code or prompts into live diagrams. Free in your browser.
Chinilla was featured in Education (78.4k followers), Developer Tools (511k followers) and Artificial Intelligence (466.2k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 178.6k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Chinilla?
Chinilla was hunted by alex. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Chinilla stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
alex
Hey product hunt! 🦖
I built Chinilla because I wanted a tool to help me understand how systems work. I tried learning through books and guides, but they're jargon heavy and still didn't give me the intuition of actually seeing and understanding systems visually.
So I built a flight simulator for it. You design a system visually, hit play, and watch traffic flow through it in real time. When your database chokes or your queue overflows, you see it happen. You fix it, run it again, and build the kind of intuition you can only get by watching things break.
What you can do:
Drag and drop 7 universal building blocks
Wire components together and define simulatable metrics and behaviors
12 programmable behaviors: queue, retry, filter, batch, rate limit, circuit breaker, and more
Hit play to simulate and watch real packets flow through your architecture
See bottlenecks, drops, and queue pressure as they happen
Scrub a timeline to inspect any moment frame by frame
Describe a system in plain english or paste code or text (frameworks, papers, etc), Chinilla AI maps it out on canvas
Collapse groups, enter subsystems, explore at any level
Find weaknesses with stability analysis, Monte Carlo with SLO targets, and stress testing
Export to PNG, GIF, SVG, Mermaid, Python code, or a markdown spec
Publish a live interactive link with a MD embed for papers or repos
16 templates to learn by doing (ML pipeline, coffee shop, chat app, rate limiter, and more)
It's free to use in your browser. The demo takes about 60 seconds and doesn't need an account: chinilla.com/demo
Free account gets you 5 cloud projects, full simulation, all export formats. No credit card.
Poured a lot of 💖 and time into this project. I'd love to hear from y'all what you think!
What's next:
Team collaboration (shared canvases, real-time cursors)
Fully fleshed out Duolingo style interactive lessons that teach system design step by step
Tighter simulate-fix loop (inline suggestions when things break)
Integrations (import from Terraform, CloudFormation, Docker Compose)
Better UX polish based on your feedback (seriously, tell me what's rough)
Launch special: LAUNCH50 for 50% off Pro monthly (until April 30)!!
Thanks for reading 😃