visual-dataflow-authoring
North star — a capability, not a product.
The AILang ecosystem lets a domain expert build and maintain a working program through a visual dataflow representation alone — without ever reading or writing the code. The human's only authoring act is annotating the representation; an LLM translates the annotations into .ail changes.
The representation is:
- domain-unspecific — it reads only language structure (defs, bodies, applications, lets, matches, effects), never a hardcoded vocabulary; node names come from the module itself;
- adjustable in detail — the function/scope hierarchy is the zoom level: a function is a black box, which the user can open (see its body as a dataflow sub-graph) and enter (make that scope the root, to edit).
Round-trip model — identical to the prose surface. Like ail prose / ail merge-prose (docs/PROSE_ROUNDTRIP.md), the visualization is a second lossy, deterministic forward projection of the canonical .ail.json; re-integration of edits goes through an LLM mediator, never a syntactic back-parser.
This is the roof. It spans several milestones. The four issues under it are the staged capabilities on the way there; each describes what should become possible, not a concrete application. (The "algo-trader who never learned to code" is an illustration of a downstream consumer, never a deliverable here.)
Precondition, not a stage — language reach (mainline). Expressing real domain logic (rich types, effect palettes, library-grade composition) grows through the ordinary language milestones. It is a standing precondition for the roof, not a numbered stage of its own.
Stages (see linked issues):
- dataflow-projection — deterministic body-level dataflow reading of the AST
- black-box-libraries — curated reusable building blocks
- annotation-roundtrip — annotations → .ail via LLM mediator
- interactive-shell — navigable, annotatable UI over the projection
(Stage 2 = language reach, mainline, no issue of its own.)
