About a decade back Bret Victor [1] talked about how his principle in life is to reduce the delay in feedback, and having faster iteration cycles not just helps in doing things (coding) better but also contributes to new creative insights. He had a bunch of examples built to showcase alternative ways of coding, which is very close to being HUDs - one example shown in the OP is very similar to the one he presents to "step through time to figure out the working of the code".
Fascinating to imagine each node being analogous to a transistor and carrying out a “basic compute”, to make up a big computer. A new abstraction layer calls out for us.
I was hoping it would speak to the second part more - why is it worth it?
I get the arguments in the abstract sense, you want the tool to be background, maximum focus spent in flow. But in my experience I’m rarely chugging out multiple WPM constant typing. This is as a software engineer coding on Python predominantly. Plus the advent of CoPilots along with autocomplete IDEs I am not even typing as much as before. Granted, I am spending less time looking at the keyboard because I have the key sequences imprinted in my head now, and that feels nice.
The blocker in flow is rarely the time I spend pecking out keys. So what am I missing, how much is it truly worth it?
How about when you have to communicate with people?
I had a terrible handwriting as a child at school, and I liked how the girls' handwriting was often very neat, so one year I decided to reteach myself how to write.
My handwriting became neater, but much slower. I never recovered the speed, so this bit me in university.
I used to joke that I never finish exams, so I make sure that everything I write is correct. I'd always do better than people who finished the whole exam.
I was introduced to computers late in life, at 16 in the early 2000s.
When I got to university, typing was a struggle. One day I saw someone typing fast. I decided to learn.
I think for me, the biggest benefit is mostly when writing long messages, more than typing. Having most conversations async at work means fewer pauses between reading and replying.
It also sometimes looks silly watching someone play hide and seek with their keyboard, because I've met people who punch in a few jets, then go hunting for others as if they've moved position.
This is lovely. I maintain a dev log at work where I manually time-stamp entries section wise, but many times I’m doing it after the fact. Ability to edit the time stamps and then search based on it would make this super powered.
Actually, I would love to combine this with Heynote[0], have you considered it?
Vipassana Meditation formalizes this to a large extent and is extremely approachable. I would highly recommend anyone looking at guided meditation to give this a try:
Can you provide some additional details? In what ways has it helped you? Would you have gotten the same benefits had you done a immersive meditation session outside of that structure?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII