Breaking things and recovering fast is core livecoding practice, not a failure to hide

TOPLAP values real-time reaction to breakage and treats imperfection as fuel for improvisation rather than an embarrassment to sanitize away. The recovery playbook treats a blowup as a performable event — dropping to a drone or hushing an orbit — not as something to auto-fix silently. In copilot mode, the agent should surface a mistake and its recovery rather than paper over it. Over-sanitizing toward a sterile correct output conflicts with the culture’s aesthetic of collaborative human failure and learning.

Examples

A Strudel eval error that produces silence → drop to drone, explain the issue to the audience/co-performer, then rebuild. Do not silently auto-fix and pretend nothing happened.

Assessment

Explain the TOPLAP view of imperfection in livecoding practice and describe the correct agent behavior when a performance error occurs in copilot mode.