Some 3D CAD programs (FreeCAD, Fusion 360, others I assume) have this sort of confusing tree view for history+dependencies+state all-in-one. Since the face of o

Some 3D CAD programs (FreeCAD, Fusion 360, others I assume) have this sort of confusing tree view for history+dependencies+state all-in-one. Since the face of one feature could be the origin of another feature, you need to have a pretty rigid order of operations that's fully explorable. The tree-view works great but UI wise for average folk, it's a cryptic use of that tree-view pattern. There is SOMETHING there though, I think if you could show the flow of data in the same space as the data itself, you'd have a worthy Excel-like thing that does well with an AI agent jumping in to either fix something or attempt to irreparably break everything. Rather than looking at a diff grid of cells with hidden expressions, or a spaghetti mess of nodes with lines, I think a structured and shallow-nested tree would be easier to understand... maybe. Rather than expressions, you'd have features like in CAD that act on some base table, and you could jump back to the table as it was at a state where that feature was applied, make a tweak, and jump forward again. Eg. Adding an item-specific tax calculation is a single operation in between the items + sum feature, rather than two operations where I have to hook up items => itemsWithTaxes, then tweak sum to read from each itemsWithTaxes. If I'm ever confused about what sum is doing while setting this up, I can go "back" in time to the state the sum feature works on, and I only see the data it has to work with.