This is an interesting idea. It's effectively what a good software engineer already does in their head, except it's doing it with a real compiler.

Richard Gabriel wrote something that has really stuck with me:

> Abstractions must be carefully and expertly designed, especially when reuse or compression is intended. However, because abstractions are designed in a particular context and for a particular purpose, it is hard to design them while anticipating all purposes and forgetting all purposes, which is the hallmark of the well-designed abstractions.

This is one of my favourite quotes on abstraction, because “anticipating all purposes and forgetting all purposes” is such a good summary of what goes into abstraction design.

A language model in an agentic harness cannot (yet) do this at the same level as a good software engineer, but the advantage they have is speed of token generation, so they can actually build the things the engineer tries to imagine, and verifying those is easier. Very cool!