In programming, we always build something initially that we can understand intuitively, then once we've gained experience with that program, more things become

In programming, we always build something initially that we can understand intuitively, then once we've gained experience with that program, more things become intuitive and we expand the software in ways we couldn't have foreseen. We change the code in ways that seem a little crazy and unlikely to work well at first, but with experience the changes become completely sensible. For example, some arbitrary piece of the code that starts out as a constant may later become a variable, and then a database table, and then a user interaction, and then a machine learning algorithm, and then an API call, and then a variable again. Source code is the best way to allow arbitrary evolution of code. Visual programming cripples the kind of evolution that is possible or reasonable. Now, what might work would be a component designer where all the state of the designer is stored as the source code in human-editable form. It might be interesting to be able to right-click a class or function call in source code and "Edit as Component". If that improves my productivity, it might be worth paying for. OTOH, such a thing now has to compete with AI code generators.