This came from a piece by Margaret-Anne Storey on "cognitive debt", picked up by @simonw, and which I personally also encountered. While building a synth engine from scratch, I kinda lost the plot. Then I let Claude document each "phase", and from that I generated Remotion videos. It worked quite well, and I learned a lot, much more than I would have from just reading the source code!
Code for synth and Remotion setup is open source: https://github.com/fdb/vamos