[_alaya]

> The more radical possibility is that source code as we know it could become a transient artifact, generated on demand and never stored. The retreat was divided on this. Some saw source code disappearing within a decade. Others argued that deterministic validation requires a stable artifact to test against, and that artifact is effectively source code regardless of what we call it.

Here’s a free idea I’ve had that I have no idea how to implement. I hope somebody much smarter than me will come along, think it’s a great idea, and steal it. I highly encourage you to do so, and I wish you well.

The idea is to have some kind of substrate—like a superpowered AST—that is the true code: the thing that actually gets compiled and run. Humans never look at this directly. Instead, we look at a representation of this code, and we can toggle between different representations of it.

I’m borrowing ideas from topology in mathematics here: if I look at a shape one way, I should be able to transform it into a different shape, but isomorphically, everything is still the same. That would let me look at the same thing in different ways, understand it from different angles, critique it more easily, and maintain it more easily.

Gemini tell me that this idea has already been tried in the past? Projectional Editing? Intentional Programming?