Great observations,
I just recently considered the CI implications, after engaging in a few discussions. I am currently working a new issue to allow an export of a PNG ( they look better than the screenshots ) if the model has changed, so that it can easily be added to a CI pipeline. Really just need to test it a bit more.
Archit Mittal
I Automate Chaos — AI workflows, n8n, Claude, and open-source automation for businesses. Turning repetitive work into one-click systems.
Django's model introspection is super underused for this exact kind of tooling — every ops team ends up hand-maintaining an ERD that drifts the moment someone adds a migration. One nice extension: combine _meta.get_fields() with Django's app_label grouping, then spit out Mermaid ER syntax so it renders natively in Markdown docs and Hashnode articles. For clients on large legacy schemas we also inject foreign_key reverse relations, which the default schema view usually misses. Did you consider exposing it as a management command so CI can snapshot the schema on each migration?