The non-linear code structure (including visually) is something I've been thinking about for a long time and arrived at very naturally. I'm the "spread all the papers on the table to take in every interaction all at once" type of person, and so often I imagined a code editor that would allow me to just "cut" a piece of code and move it to the side. Separating stuff into files is kinda this, but it's not visual and just creates a lot of mess when I try to separate out small functions that are not reusable somewhere else. I don't even need the underlying non-linearity — just let me move the papers around on my code desk!

yea i tried to do this (somewhat successfully) with a custom editor for css https://github.com/feralsoft/charisma (demos on my old x https://x.com/charisma_css)

css is primed for this since you can write your rules in such a way that rule order doesn't matter, which means you really don't have to think about where your code it

in my dream world, i have very smart search (probably llms will help), i look at just the minimal amount of code (ideally on a canvas), edit it and remove it from my context

i don't care where or how the code is stored, let the editor figure it out and just give me really good search and debuggers

You might like https://cs.brown.edu/~spr/codebubbles/