A 3d environment (VR-headset with Tom Cruise-style-swiping, or Doom-style with WASD navigation) would be cool, one could be "in orbit", observing the system, watching the nodes and their interactions, and pause and see what messages they're passing to each other. How about time-travel-debugging to allow rewinds too!
replyAs a bonus, porting Doom to it should be "trivial".
> I feel like most good programmers are like good chess players.
replyA specific type or area of developers, I'd say. There are many types and not all of them require understanding sizeable code bases to do their work well.
Understanding your large codebase is a few prompts away. You can ask a model to trace through and provide reports on the project's design, architectural and implementation. From there, you can drill in with followups.
replyDone right, you may not know specific lines or chunks of code by heart, but much like a tuned-in company CEO, you have eyes and ears on the ground and retain global oversight and insight of the project itself. For specifics, you can learn what you need as you need it. If that means knowing how every single module works, that's just a conversation with your agent.