Designing AUTOSAR Classic SWCs Without DaVinci Developer

I spent over a decade working in Classic AUTOSAR. In every company I worked at, the same frustration kept showing up: SWC design was locked inside a proprietary GUI tool, ARXML files were unreadable in code review, validation was a manual process, and the license costs were significant enough that not every engineer on the team had access. So during some free time I built ARForge — a lightweight, open source tool that lets you design AUTOSAR Classic SWCs in plain YAML, validate them with a semantic rule engine, and export standards-compliant ARXML. No GUI, no license server. Runs on Linux and Windows. Fits into a CI pipeline. This article walks through a complete example — from defining interfaces and SWC types to wiring a composition and exporting ARXML. The problem with current tooling If you have worked with DaVinci Developer, you know the pain points: Every change produces a large XML diff that is nearly impossible to review meaningfully in a pull request Validation is tied to the