The Puranic story most often told about Diti is a story about grief and about a vow. Her sons by Kashyapa have been killed by Indra, and she undertakes an observance so as to conceive a son who will kill him in turn, on the condition that she keeps the vow perfectly for a fixed term. Indra, who cannot break the observance from outside, attends on her, waits for a lapse, and when she sleeps at an hour the vow forbids he enters her womb and cuts the embryo with his thunderbolt. The pieces cry out. He cuts them again, and the fragments become the Maruts, the storm gods who then ride with him.
The story does several things at once, and none of them are flattering to anybody. It gives the Maruts an origin that binds them to the god they accompany. It puts Indra in the position of committing an act against a pregnant woman which the text does not present as heroic. And it lets a mother of the losing side produce, out of an act of revenge that fails, a set of gods who join the winning one. That is characteristic of how the tradition handles the deva and asura conflict: the two families are not good and evil but kin, and the traffic between them goes both ways.
It also gives Diti the only thing resembling a personality she has. Elsewhere she is a position in a genealogy. Here she is a bereaved parent whose attempt at redress is defeated by a technicality in her own vow, and whose defeat produces something the tradition then celebrates. The Daityas keep her name, the Maruts keep her body, and she keeps neither of them.