coding agents

Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, gives a demo-heavy GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on live coding music. He covers the history of Sonic Pi, how it evolved, and what it can do for education and professional musicians.

A long livestream of George Hotz live-coding a toy SLAM implementation, twitchslam, over two days in May 2018. It is an unedited session of Python programming with computer vision and visualization.

Footage of Notch (Markus Persson) live-coding his Minicraft game in Java during a Ludum Dare 48-hour game jam. It shows a working game developer building a complete small game from scratch.

A Y Combinator video on vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for letting LLMs write code. It reports what YC founders say about debugging, models and how much of their code is AI-written.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.

A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.

A HOPE XI talk on programming by voice with open source speech recognition. The speaker writes Linux systems code by voice and describes building custom voice grammars as an alternative to the keyboard for programmers with repetitive strain injuries.

Brian Peiris demonstrates RiftSketch, a web app where you write JavaScript with Three.js while wearing an Oculus Rift and watch the world around you change live. It runs on Firefox builds with WebVR.

John Carmack live-codes a simple VR application at Oculus Connect 2 using a Racket-based environment for rapid development and deployment on Gear VR.

Sam Aaron live codes an ambient electronic set using Sonic Pi, the music programming environment he created. The performance shows code driving music in real time.

Steve Yegge shows Efrit, a tool that gives Claude full control of Emacs, on the Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene show. Claude opens info pages, runs shells and even draws a Mandelbrot fractal in a buffer.

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

Inigo Quilez live-codes the "Happy Jumping" animated scene in a Shadertoy GLSL shader over about six hours. He builds the raymarched character step by step, explaining the math and procedural techniques, with checkpoints linked for each stage.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant shows how fMRI brain mapping can be used to decode what a person sees, with visualizations of brain activity and its implications.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

A roughly hour-long live hacking session in which Go team members Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick write the new version of tip.golang.org, the site serving leading-edge Go documentation. It is unedited pair programming on a real Go project.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

A timelapse of Notch (Markus Persson) making Metagun, a game built from scratch in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 18. It shows the whole coding session sped up.

Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by and starring Douglas Adams, who tours an imagined future of hypertext and software agents. It features Ted Nelson among others.

Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School laying out software 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, with LLMs seen as utilities, fabs and operating systems. It covers LLM quirks, partial-autonomy apps and keeping a human in the generate-and-verify loop.

A short unscripted demo of writing FizzBuzz in JavaScript with a generator function on a steno keyboard, typos included. It gives a feel for what real coding in stenography looks like.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Tavis Rudd describes how RSI forced him to program by voice, and shows the Python and Emacs Lisp system he built with voice recognition. A live demo creates and deploys a small system without touching the keyboard.

Ruby developer Avdi Grimm gives a seven-minute tour of Pharo Smalltalk's development environment, focusing on tools like search-by-example and the integrated, live coding experience.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Rich Hickey's long presentation on Clojure and concurrency covers locking and immutability, then goes in depth on refs, transactions and agents. It ends with a multithreaded ant colony simulation demo.

Bisqwit writes a NES emulator in C++ in about 15 minutes of tool-assisted, sped-up coding, narrated with captions. It shows an accurate emulator built with a compile-time generated 6502 instruction table. Part 2 covers compiling and running it.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Tom Stuart's Ruby Manor 3 talk builds FizzBuzz using nothing but Ruby lambdas, working through Church encodings of numbers, booleans and data structures. It is a hands-on introduction to lambda calculus.