[justsomeuser]

> Anything to reduce the friction from thought to working software without having to worry about syntax

I think that the text/notation based representation of programs (or state machines) is the most effective way.

The reason is that it leverages the human ability to use language. I think our intuition for language and thought is much better than our intuition for 2d/3d spaces.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but if you need exact precision, as programs need, no amount of non-text-pictures would give you that flexibility to describe exactly what you want without losing details.

There is a steep learning curve to languages, but once you have learnt the language, these concepts get attached and integrated to your thoughts. This allows you to design increasingly higher levels of abstraction, until you are working with concepts in your current domain.