source: [[Moldable Development - series]] [[Topic - context is everything]] [[how to innovate]] Software engineering is seen from the outside as something creative, but in reality much time is passed reading code and decide what to do next. The decision making process is manual and limited by the standard tools used. That standardisation means that there are no special tool aware of your context and your code. (That is somewhat changing with GenAI). Having generic tools for coding means that most of the research for decion making is made by reading code. And since non-dev people cannot read code, coders need to convert their understanding of the code into graphs (usually) that others can understand. That layer of abstraction based not on how things work but how the dev think things works is an open door for assumptions, approximations and errors. In Moldable development the system under observation + context aware tools provide the interface between a running system (not even code) and humans. # Approach - Decision to be made, for example next step in developing a product. - Assessment - Exploration - Conversation - Information - Synthetization - Investigation environment - System or data # Notes - Moldable development is for software, but its concepts are wider. - It is about development and communication in one go - Development has a graphical interface that is contextual to what the developer is trying to do. This is why Pharo is a good language, it has a UI in it. - The Glamorous Toolkit is a new UI for Pharo really. And works very much like Observable - I might build things in Observable that match GT - Observable Framework and Plot feel like a good complement. - Observable notebook or canvas probably too - We build specialised tools to interrogate a running system and provide the information we need here and now. - Getting one answer fast often triggers a next question - The fastest we can build tools that provide answers the more accurate our decisions will be - So the simplicity of building context aware tools is at the centre of the Moldable approach.