[ken]

"What we want is a vehicle for exploring that space -- something like an IDE for your problem domain. It's been joked that any problem in computing can be solved with another level of indirection, but I wonder if it would actually be better for software teams to build not the thing they want, but rather the thing that makes the thing they want."

To this Lisp programmer, this sounds like plain old bottom-up design. I'm making primitives and syntax for The Thing I Want. My IDE essentially is an IDE for my problem domain.

It's a bit harder in other languages, but still more or less feasible. I think many people would be surprised by how much of my software is written in itself.