🌒 3:30 AM Realization: Structure Is the Work

Couldn’t sleep two nights ago. Something was nagging at me, and by 3:30 AM I was wide awake, turning it over in my head. What finally surfaced was this: there’s actually a lot of structure in how I prepare plans and prompts for a node. That structure isn’t just overhead or prep work. It is the thing that makes everything else possible.

Nodes themselves come easily. They show up while I’m working through a problem or riffing with the LLM. I don’t chase them. They appear, faster than I can handle. But once a node crystallizes, the workflow kicks in. I generate an initial plan. Then I audit it. Relentlessly.

Does it overlap with other plans? Are the layers meaningful? Will this generalize to future use cases? Where’s the wiring? I’m not just checking output. I’m checking fit, cohesion, and forward compatibility.

Then I batch-generate the prompts. They’re usually weak on first pass (scoring 70-ish) so we revise until they’re strong (90+). But that scoring isn’t just about making the LLM perform better. It’s about me understanding what the layer is really doing. The loop works because it keeps both of us honest: the model and me.

That’s when it clicked. This whole process is less about producing code and more about producing understanding. It's spec writing process designed to get things straight in my head, as much as it is getting the right prompts in place. The LLM could technically pass the output between steps, but if I don't know what's in the plans and prompts, good luck getting anything I want out of the process. The power of the system isn’t that it can write nodes. It’s that it can teach me to think in nodes. That’s what makes the final result reliable and reusable.

That realization breaks the open-source framing.

This isn’t a dev framework people can just clone and start building with. Not unless they’ve internalized the whole structure:
- the audit questions
- the scoring loop
- the role-goal-prompt alignment
- the architectural literacy that makes everything work.

Without all of the above (and probably more I haven't identified yet), they’ll throw garbage into the system and say it’s broken.

The real path forward isn’t to open-source the code-generation scripts. Instead, I think I need to host a full-stack code-design system that outputs code by taking the user through a highly opinionated and structured product specification process.