I spent 2.5 months building a spatial compiler for lazer cutter plans to build a (massive) shelf. The shelf is built! But all the parts were mirrored, which was not an actual problem, but it was unexpected (a polarity problem somewhere). For a few other test projects, when the edges are nearly the same length on the parts, the assembly is ambiguous, and it kinda assembles but the shape gets warped from misfitting. So recently I added labels to the edges, so I know which side should match which without ambiguous matching based on eyeballed length. After adding the labels the part visualisation had the numbers backwards, AH HA! my revelation was that this explained why my parts were mirrored. My whole schtick at the moment is data viz driven development. Dataviz of runtime application state is the extension of text based coding/debugging that delivers value beyond our existing programming paradigms.

Heck yeah, that's satisfying. This is an abduction from the context of (awesome) solo projects, but I also wonder if that 'value beyond existing paradigms' is particular to collaborative projects? I keep having to explain the 'visual debugging' thing to non-engineering stakeholders as a participatory design move, or a sketching practice, or something. Everyone else who isn't a 'data scientist' is just not used to being invited in at that stage of software prototyping yet.

yeah the problem with stakeholders is they don't really care about the specifics so I dunno if these things are so useful. Peers, yes, if you have sufficiently compatible shared understanding, but even with some peers I can't also get them to mentally assemble things the same way I do. Glad you like the view composition stuff. I wish I had infinite time to make a better version of view.

Yeah, I expect the situation out in industry is quite different. In an aerospace context, I got to work with a systems engineer whose different stakeholders all cared deeply about different specifics. Hence there was an actual communication problem, despite that kind of shared mindset. We were lucky in that a senior person saw our project had fallen in-between silos, and recruited another team lead who then advocated for the thing. Must be, they liked the demo of the janky notebook prototype. I do imagine this would be unusual in say, webdev.