I recognize the fatigue Vaughn describes. Writing longform English to describe every change is its own tedium, and the prompts vanish afterward — no record of what I actually wanted, only code that may or may not have come from a machine. Huzzah’s answer is to make the pseudocode file the artifact: terse, declarative, persistent, with the diff on save becoming the prompt.
What I’d steal even without the editor: keep a durable spec file next to the code that expresses intent, and edit that. Vaughn is honest about the limits — better for new codebases than existing ones, unclear at scale, awkward for cross-file dependencies, no LSP. Fair. I’d try it on something small and self-contained first.
The story — Daniel Vaughn, burned out on writing longform English to coding agents by August, is building an experimental editor called Huzzah. Instead of prompts that are longform, imperative, and transient, you write pseudocode in a .hz file — declarative and persistent. Saving generates real code; editing captures the diff as the prompt and regenerates. He shows fizz buzz, a shopping cart, and a todo list, and lists caveats. It’s experimental, source available. (Source)