I think programmers are frustrated in part because the code used to be our place to do our thinking, but now LLMs just buzz through the file changing thousands of lines and we can't keep up.

It's still valuable to deeply understand parts of a program, but we don't have any tooling that helps us do that. We just have to raw-dog it by thinking really really hard and remembering how all the code connects together.

I want a tool that gives programmers a place to record their thoughts. Developers need a place to draw and write, and also interleave blocks of code that automatically update to match the actual state of the code.

The closest thing I know to this is org-babel, part of Emacs, which allows you to push code blocks out of an org file into an actual source files, or pull them in from actual source files. This is mostly done manually by invoking functions called `tangle` and `detangle`.

I intend to investigate this further in Emacs, since I'm an Emacs user, but Emacs is never going to be the friendly UI we need to make this tooling common.

I feel like we also need better non-LLM driven ways (like better static analysis tools) to analyze LLM-driven changes. The way changes are presented in modern IDEs was designed around reviewing human-created changes and doesn’t really feel like it’s keeping up with presenting and validating what modern LLMs are doing.

> now LLMs just buzz through the file changing thousands of lines and we can't keep up. It's still valuable to deeply understand parts of a program, but we don't have any tooling that helps us do that.

I do it differently, I focus on better recording what the user wanted, the so-called "user intent". To do this, I record all messages typed by the user since the start of the project, whether 3,000 or 10,000 messages. An LLM can churn through them in 10 minutes and derive a fresh, up-to-date interpretation from the raw data. This can be used to judge whether the implementation has diverged from the intent, or, in other words, to realign the code and tests. The messages the user writes are usually designs or corrections, a very rich, compact signal. If the user struggles with something, it could result in a tool, a skill, updates to the project docs, or new tests.

> It's still valuable to deeply understand parts of a program, but we don't have any tooling that helps us do that. We just have to raw-dog it by thinking really really hard and remembering how all the code connects together.

I deeply relate to this. When engineers were writing all the code that meant every part was deeply understood by _someone_ on the team, and they could valuably contribute to maintenance and further development. It wasn’t perfect, people leave, people forget things, etc, but the overall coverage was high and valuable.

Now, every agent-produced MR introduces code that is deeply understood by _no one_. It’s the “original developer left five years ago” problem, but now growing on every single new piece of code. Reviewing doesn’t give you the same depth of understanding, and the continually increasing impulse is to just approve, maybe nudge it about some isolated enum types or something, but don’t take the time to understand it, just keep the train going.

But then what happens when something breaks and the cloud agents are down…

Yeah, this is the tough part. In order to write code that worked, you had to have some kind of mental model of it. Now that's not true.

Now, when someone sends a working PR in, even high quality and well tested, they may actually have no idea how it works.

I've been having agents build knowledge graphs, they're a tremendous mess to start with, but I take the time to manually drag nodes around or group them in meaningful ways so that it's actually human-browsable. This is boring enough to create space for me to think in. It leads me to go on expeditions into the code which surface the missing details. It's also a nice way to communicate context to agents. Like, I can hide all but the relevant nodes from an agent before suggesting that it query the graph to understand which service references which other service via which api, which database tables are read/written by such an action, etc...

> I want a tool that gives programmers a place to record their thoughts. Developers need a place to draw and write, and also interleave blocks of code that automatically update to match the actual state of the code.

Sounds, like you already mention with org-mode or similar ones) like literate programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or jupyter notebook.

I think the solution is still code, just at a much higher level of abstraction. Maybe a start is kind of typed ADR or FSM that guides (constrains) the agents. I believe more type checking guarantees will be more and more important for agents.

> It's still valuable to deeply understand parts of a program

Part of woe is that once you've reviewed, validated, and comprehended a piece... Later gets casually mangled by some other LLM-generated urgent change.

I find that there are domains where LLMs are much faster and more skilled than I am, particularly in extremely well-documented but technical and complicated, but a lot of domains where they cannot do anything at all (mostly novel issues, weird architecture issue resolution, etc.).

Building a basic X11 window manager is almost a one shot prompt.

Modifying a UI toolkit to make it work with MSAA/IA2 is simply not possible.

There's a lot of room for deep work left... for now.

The workflow I use to still keep up with everything is to start coding by hand and only once I have a good idea how the rest is gonna look like and am bored I had off the rest of the pr to the LLM.

Could be just defining the methods without filling them but depending on the mood I code more by hand or less.

Yeah, I can relate to this. However, I haven't found it too difficult to adjust. I have found myself creating draft PRs, and then just sitting on them and thinking about it for a day or two before I even consider merging it. This lag time is the time that I used to spend typing it out and thinking as I went along, now that's happening later. I have closed more than a couple of my own PRs once I had time to consider them. I am rarely shocked when I wake up the next day, look at it, and think: "Eh, this change is not sufficient because it doesn't address X".

> It's still valuable to deeply understand parts of a program, but we don't have any tooling that helps us do that. We just have to raw-dog it by thinking really really hard and remembering how all the code connects together

Which is frankly exhausting to do when you have to keep up with the rate of LLM changes