Make RACI matrices from text

raci Voyage Operations
roles
  Cap  red
  QM   orange
  Bos  yellow
  Nav  blue
  Crew gray

[Departure] teal
  Plot the course
    Heading, currents, weather window
    Cap: A
    Nav: R
    QM: C
  Provision the hold
    QM: A R
    Cap: C
    Crew: I

[At Sea] purple
  Stand the watch
    Bos: A
    Crew: R
  Sight the next port
    Nav: A R
    Cap: C

Overview

A responsibility matrix mapping tasks against roles, tagging each cell with a marker for that role’s involvement — for clarifying who does what on a project and removing ownership ambiguity. Reach for it when the question is accountability rather than order or status. The raci chart type covers three variants — RACI, RASCI, and DACI — with author-time linting against the structural rules of each. The variant is inferred from the markers you use and cannot be declared. Mixing marker alphabets therefore silently selects a variant you didn’t intend and lints your chart against the wrong rules, so keep one alphabet per chart.

The variant is inferred from the markers used in the chart — there is no directive to declare it. To get DACI, use D markers; to get RASCI, use S markers.

When to use

• raci — you need to record who is on the hook for which specific task, with no ordering implied.
• org — you’re showing the reporting chain rather than task ownership.
• swimlane — the order of the work matters, not just who owns each part.
• kanban — you’re tracking the status of work items rather than assigning responsibility.
• heatmap — your cells hold numbers rather than a kind of involvement.
• tech-radar — you’re assigning confidence to technologies rather than ownership of tasks.

Syntax

raci Title
// optional directives: roles, palette, theme, active-tag

// optional bracketed phase header + trailing-token color
[Phase Label] color
  // task name — 2-space indent
  Task name
    // description — 4-space indent, before any role line
    Optional description line
    // role assignment — 4-space indent, space-delimited markers
    Role: <markers>
  Another task
    // combined-marker cell
    Role: A R

Three-level indentation: phase → task → role assignment / description. Phase headers are optional; tasks without a phase are valid.

Variant resolution

The variant is inferred from the markers you use:

1. Any D marker → DACI.
2. Any S marker → RASCI.
3. Otherwise → RACI.
4. Mixed-marker conflict. If both D and S appear, fires E_RACI_MIXED_VARIANTS — a chart can’t be both DACI and RASCI.

The resolved variant is shown in the rendered chart’s header label.

Roles

Declare column order with the roles directive. Two equivalent forms:

// inline form (name-only)
roles Cap, QM, Bos

// block form — supports per-role color
roles
  Cap red
  QM  orange
  Bos yellow

When roles is present, any role used in a task assignment that wasn’t declared emits the W_RACI_UNKNOWN_ROLE warning.

Per-role color uses the universal trailing-token form (Cap red) — same as cycle / pyramid / ring / boxes-and-lines layers. The inline form is name-only; to color roles, use the block form. The same-line form (Cap color: red) is also accepted, but reserve it for when another metadata key rides along.

Phase metadata

Phase headers accept a trailing-token color for per-phase styling:

[Departure] teal
[At Sea] purple

The phase bar tints to a soft mix of the color over the background. Phases without color fall back to a neutral gray bar.

Directives

There is no directive for selecting the variant — it comes from the markers.

Validation warnings

Structural linting runs on every chart. These fire as warnings, so the diagram still renders:

Two conditions are errors rather than warnings: E_RACI_MIXED_VARIANTS when both D and S appear, and E_RACI_MULTI_ACCOUNTABLE when a task names more than one Accountable.

Display vs source ordering

Markers in cells are always rendered in canonical alphabet order (R A C I, R A S C I, D A C I) regardless of source order. Source casing and order are preserved in the file; mutations operate on source order to keep round-trips byte-stable except for the cell that changed.

Complete Example — DACI

raci Choose the next port
roles Cap, Nav, QM, Bos

Pick destination
  Cap: D
  Nav: A
  QM: C
  Bos: I

Decide departure window
  Cap: D
  Nav: C
  QM: A
  Bos: I

Without a phase header, tasks sit at the left margin and role lines take the 2-space indent — each level shifts up by one.

The D markers make this a DACI chart by inference — no directive exists to say so explicitly.

Appearance

Every chart accepts the universal appearance directives:

Colors come from the active palette — see Colors. Set the palette and light/dark theme at render time with --palette <name> and --theme light|dark|transparent.

Next

• Related: org · swimlane · kanban · heatmap · tech-radar
• Then: Colors & palettes