tudorgirba

Moldable Development is a way of programming through contextual tools. This is a case study showing how thousands of contextual tools can coexist in a unified development environment for a 35M lines of code system. These tools help developers handle many workflows seamlessly without leaving the environment.

I am glad that AI provides what you are looking for.

I'd still be interested if you have a specific point you disagree with in relation to what I wrote above and in particular, what we wrote in our little book (the link is above) specifically about the topic of this conversation.

Great! :)

Sure. Those are technical details.

But ask yourself: how many things have been expressed this way? For example, what about security? Business domain documentation? Performance? Architecture? Discovering APIs? etc

It's not that the idea is not useful. It's that it's incomplete. We should not get stuck on it.

Please do feel free to email!

Or contact me on social media.

Thanks for the suggestion.

orgmode is certainly interesting, but again, its goal is a (small) subset of what is achievable with GT :). And as you say, even that is hard for beginners.

> Lastly, it is a bold statement to say something like "we have discovered a new development methodology, and have designed this toolkit around that philosophy". Such a statement requires a ton of evidence that such a methodology is useful, and currently there simply is not enough.

I am well aware of what that statement says. I did not utter it in the first 10 years of this journey. But by now, I do believe we do have the evidence, and a good deal of it is even available publicly and freely. Of course, there is still this little issue of people actually taking the time to evaluate that evidence. If people are not going to look at the evidence, it's never going to be enough. And that's just fine because eventually, some people will look at it :).

No, AI is not Moldable Development. AI can help Moldable Development (mostly as an optimization).

Moldable Development is first and foremost about the interface. AI is an engine. The interface is the thing you interact through. Like the chat. Or the editor with chat abilities. That little layer is worth paying attention to. Because it will define how you think about your interactions with AI.

Thanks for the feedback. And for the kind words.

>The only problem is that they seem to get unwieldy after a certain point. The view of all the different tools / libraries that come with it at the end of the presentation shows that.

That view at the end does not show that they get unwieldy at all. It shows that the contextual tools were needed everywhere. If the cost of tools is so low that you can amortize the cost of a tool on the first use, you can literally throw them away after that first use. In fact that's the fate of most tools. Those thousands of tools that you can see in a GT distribution are those that proved to be reusable. Many more were not :)

There were many tools that showed some visualization. But what we try to show with GT is that there exists a way to tackle arbitrary problems. This is possible because we see the environment itself as being a language made out of visual and interactive operators that can be combined in many ways.

Consider joining us on Discord to look into more details :)

Nice summary!

Indeed, we regard software engineering as being primarily decision making. This is a stark departure from the typical perception of software engineering as a construction activity.

Once you take this path, the tools are going to be different. So different that they will appear odd to most people used to the other point of view.

For example, a typical development environment will start with an editor. But editing should come after reading. So, that design is really not that ideal. Having the editing come at the end is perhaps more appropriate. And there are several other such consequences that stem from that original difference in points of view.

Few green field, but that's not because of the technology merits.

I am not sure why you are saying that I am not paying attention to how AI is impacting software development. I just pointed you to a chapter that shows that it's not a competitor at all. Moldable Development and GenAI are complementary :)

In GT, we have integration with LLMs as well, including programatic ways to create interfaces for it.

MCP is certainly interesting.

Thanks for the clarification! I am sorry for the confusion.

I am glad you found the demos interesting. I’d be interested what made them attractive from your point of view.