Dumb question: Why not just put an instruction into your favorite harness’ system prompt: “If I give you pseudo code, spell out my intent, and then write and test it in real code.”
Not a dumb question - you can totally do this. I was doing this for a while. Before Claude Code really took off, this was my primary way to use Cursor. I'd write some pseudocode, highlight it, and just write to the AI "make it real". Works like a charm. The issue is that with very large or complex codebases, you tend to forget what was AI generated and what was written by a human. And it's also extremely tedious and…
I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out when it comes time to debug.
At that time, someone else may be reading my pseudo code and implicitly assuming that the code was translated correctly. If the code wasn't translated correctly, wouldn't the human who naturally assumes it was miss the bug every time?
Huzzah would benefit from having a guard identify pseudo code with two potential interpretations and ask the human to clarify so the reliability of the interpretation does not suffer.