Students’ code submissions show their final outcomes, but not the process of making, questioning, and revising design decisions. This experience report studies Ladder, a program design environment based on natural-language dialogue, as a means of preserving design traces. Its staged dialogue makes the design process observable, but also requires students to express each step in writing, which can make the interaction effortful. This motivates future systems that retain consequential parts of the design process with less interaction burden.