I think that is because you do implicit plan tracking, creation and modification of the plan in your head in light of new information and then follow that plan. I'm not sure these tools do that very well.
The long running task, at it's core, is composed of many smaller tasks and you mostly focus on one task at a time per brain part. It's why you cannot read two streams of text simultaneously even if both are in your visual focus field.
> you do implicit plan tracking, creation and modification of the plan in your head in light of new information and then follow that plan. I'm not sure these tools do that very well.
I think the plan is not just words, if it was, you could read a book on how to ride a bike.
Because we communicate in language and because code output is also a language we think that the process is also language based, but I think it's not, especially when doing hard stuff.
I know for certain in my case it isn't -- when tracking a hard problem for a junior after 2 hours of pair programming the other week, I had to tell him to commit everything and just let me do some deep thinking/debugging and I solved the problem myself. Sure I explained my process to him in language the best I could, but it's clear it was not language, it was not liniar, I did not think it step by step.
I wish I could explain it, but when figuring out a hard problem, for me it takes some time to take it all in, get used to the moving parts, play with them. I'm sure there are actual neurons/synapses formed then, actual new wires sprawling about in the brain, that's why it takes time. I think the solution is a hardware one, not a software one.
That's why we can sleep on it and get better the next day and that's why we feel the problem. There are actual multiple paralel "threads" of thinking going at the same time in our heads and we can FEEL the solution as almost there.
I think it simply is that hard problems can occur in a combination of code, state, models that simply cannot be solved incrementally and big jumps are necessary.
I'm not saying the problem cannot be solved incrementally, but it's possible that by going in small steps, you either reach the solution or a blocker that requires a big jump.
The long running task, at it's core, is composed of many smaller tasks and you mostly focus on one task at a time per brain part. It's why you cannot read two streams of text simultaneously even if both are in your visual focus field.