size coding

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Debris by Farbrausch, the winner of the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition. All of its 3D visuals, textures and music come from a single 177 KB executable.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, the winning PC 4k intro at Revision 2012. It is a realtime demo with music and fractal visuals in 4096 bytes.

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.

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.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

A Commodore 64 demo by Linus Akesson that fits video and music into 256 bytes, winning the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. A technical write-up accompanies it.

A recording of .the .product by Farbrausch, the first-place 64k intro at The Party 2000. It fits an 11-minute 3D demo with music into 64 kilobytes.

Memories is a 256-byte MS-DOS demo that packs eight effects and MIDI soundscapes into a tiny program. It won first place at Revision 2020.

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.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

A one-minute capture of Tim Clarke's 1993 'Mars' DOS demo, a roughly 5 KB program that renders a navigable terrain landscape in real time.

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.

A 256-byte MS-DOS intro that renders a raymarched, procedural 3D animation. It won the 256-byte competition at Riverwash 2009 and the scene.org award for best technical achievement that year, and the author published commented x86 assembly source.

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.

A short look at the Voder, the first electronic voice synthesizer, demonstrated by Bell Labs at the 1939 World's Fair. It was operated by trained women using ten finger keys, foot pedals and a knee lever.

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.

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

Musician Thoj performs a live looping session on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer, building a deep house track layer by layer.

A GameTrailers walkthrough from E3 2012 of an Unreal Engine 4 real-time tech demo with Epic's Alan Willard. It shows live code changes and hot reloading while the game runs.

A five-minute demo of a live ClojureScript game editor by Chris Granger. It is based on Bret Victor's demo from the Inventing on Principle talk, with code changes reflected instantly in the running game.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

A run through the 32 factory presets of the Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer, with timestamps for each patch such as brass, strings, pianos, bass and tubular bells. It is a straight audio demo of the sounds.

Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer, shows how he writes and debugs code in Visual Studio 2017 using a screen reader. The short demo shows an expert doing ordinary developer tasks.

Bruce Hauman live-codes Flappy Bird in ClojureScript in about six minutes, using figwheel to hot-reload changes into the running game. The demo shows game behavior being changed interactively without restarting.

Allan Blomquist demonstrates the internal programming and debugging tools Tomorrow Corporation uses to make games, including live modification of a running game and time-travel debugging.

Stephen Wolfram gives a 13-minute tour of the Wolfram Language, a symbolic, functional programming language with a built-in knowledgebase. He demos querying large datasets, interactivity and deployment.

Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown shows his workflow for animating math videos with Manim, with Ben Sparks. He codes scenes live, including a Lorenz attractor, and walks through example scenes.

A long George Hotz livestream in which he explores the coronavirus genome and molecular biology from scratch using a browser and Python, hacking on the science in real time.

A five-minute video showing how to build a counter in the Imba web programming language in under a minute, then style it.

Samuel Falvo II live-codes a text preprocessor and blog engine in Forth over about an hour. It shows Forth's dictionary being snapshotted and restored in place of mutation, and how a small Forth system gets real work done.

A DevOps YouTuber tests GitHub Copilot on a range of Leetcode problems and finds it solves most immediately, with a few needing tweaks and some far off. He concludes it would outperform him in a FAANG-style interview.

The Thought Emporium's host describes making and taking a DIY gene therapy to treat his own lactose intolerance. It uses an AAV virus to deliver DNA coding for the lactose-digesting enzyme, made with biohacker Gabriel Licina's help.