I'm in.
Despite our best efforts, the vast majority of source code is still in plain text. Lots of tools operating on source code only work with that plain text. Advanced tools however, like the Language Server in your favorite IDE, use this plain text as a starting point to build up rich, complex, and ultimately incredibly useful data structures in which your code lives. These tools understand your code, in many cases better than you do yourself. (And way-too-often they need to be restarted because they manage to run themselves into some infinite loop or whatever but I digress.)
A tool that is at least slightly aware of the code you have written could compare two states of the same code base and:
1️⃣ Look past changes in formatting to focus on what's actually relevant.
2️⃣ Group related changes so renaming a constant is one change instead of several dozen.
3️⃣ Examine the entire code base instead of handling every file individually.
4️⃣ Track where code came from and where it was moved to.
5️⃣ Present the entirety of the changes in a sensible and ordered way.
6️⃣ And finally, figure out what changes weren't even made.
And that's what I'll be exploring during the Visibility Jam.
diff, differ, &diffest

(originally posted on 2023-03-04 in #jam)