AI mindmap generator from text

Mindmaps are the visual thinking tool for when you're trying to make an unstructured brain-dump legible. Reach for them at the earliest stage of planning any complex topic — before you have a real hierarchy, before you know which concerns are top-level, before an actual outline exists. Their strength is asymmetric: the tree structure is stronger than a bullet list at showing which ideas are peers and which are children, but weaker than a flowchart at showing sequence, and weaker than a state diagram at showing rules. So use them when the "shape" of the ideas is the useful thing — during brainstorming, in interview scoping (junior engineers reason better with mindmaps than with prose), and when you're capturing the outline of a design doc before you commit to a structure. Mermaid's mindmap syntax uses indentation for hierarchy and supports different node shapes (rectangles, rounded, hexagons, circles) for visual distinction. It's intentionally spare compared to dedicated mindmap tools like XMind or MindMeister — no icons, no rich formatting, no drag-to-reorganize. That's the tradeoff for keeping it in plain text you can commit alongside code.