The way the authors talk about live coding as – they don’t explicitly say that – a way of breaking free from algorithmic routines resonates with me more than I thought it would. Something about coding is you always write a program to get it to do the output we expect. We always want it to reach the “perfect” point where it exactly does what we tell it to do; even with AI, we train models to do what we want to a limit we are scared of not being able to estimate the output results. with live coding, “When we write code live, we adapt it to our needs, and it adapts us in return.” they said everything is an average software engineer’s natural fear. “Then we do not use computers; they use us” as they also said, what every coder naturally fears.

I do love coding, programming, trying to get the program to work, trying to reach a specific goal. Hence the idea of letting the code, the output lead your process scares me. It is scary to not be able to expect the output. It is scary to write words not knowing what they will do. To combine lines not knowing what the perfect next line looks like. But in a way, it feels relieving. It is relieving the pressure of perfection, and diving into the beauty of an uncertain result. It will take effort to break free from the routine. “Turning the laptop into a kind of universal instrument whose own capabilities and boundaries can in turn be redefined.” is a sentence that any computer scientist with a goal will not understand.