Live coding's real-time loop between coder and machine is itself a creative method, not just a format

Jack, quoting Daniel Sandin, argues the defining feature of live coding is the tight creative loop rather than performance visibility: you act, the result appears immediately, and that result tunes your next action. Sandin’s framing is that you enter a feedback loop in order to learn something, so your action can be continually corrected. This changes the development process itself; Jack reports that building Hydra changed how she approaches all software, and that even knowing every line she still can’t predict what a new chain will do, so the live loop is the only practical way to explore such systems. The implication for learners: live coding is a distinct exploratory mode, not merely a faster edit-compile cycle.

Examples

Jack: even though she built Hydra and knows all its code, she ‘still doesn’t know what’s gonna happen’ when adding a chain, so the constant back-and-forth with the running result is how she works, not an afterthought.

Assessment

Explain why Jack treats the real-time feedback loop as constitutive of live coding rather than incidental, and relate it to Sandin’s claim that you enter a feedback loop ‘so you can learn something’.