Dumb question:

Why not just put an instruction into your favorite harness’ system prompt: “If I give you pseudo code, spell out my intent, and then write and test it in real code.”

Not a dumb question - you can totally do this. I was doing this for a while. Before Claude Code really took off, this was my primary way to use Cursor. I'd write some pseudocode, highlight it, and just write to the AI "make it real". Works like a charm.

The issue is that with very large or complex codebases, you tend to forget what was AI generated and what was written by a human. And it's also extremely tedious and difficult to read AI generated code. So if you want to _understand_ a complex bit of code, the natural tendency is to ask an agent to summarize it for you. This can work but also has lots of problems.

What you really want is a system that persists both your written intent, and the actual source code. And you want to provide a source map between them, so that you can understand which bits of human pseudocode are responsible for which bits of generated code.

The real value is in persisting your expressed intent.