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Leon Martin
Leon Martin

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Is Making Music With Strudel the Last Place Where Coding Still Feels Like… Coding?

#javascript #music #ai #programming

There’s something funny happening in software right now.

And by “funny,” I mean the kind of funny where you laugh so you don’t cry.

Three years ago, the tech world was a battlefield layoffs everywhere, senior devs flipping burgers on weekends, juniors trying to get into the industry by rewriting the same CRUD app in 15 frameworks. Now? Nobody reads documentation. Nobody searches on YouTube for the right tutorial anymore. Nobody even tries to understand why something works.

They just ask an LLM.

And the LLM says: “Here you go, champ 👌, pi pi pop pip pop 🎵” and gives you an entire repo.

This is the new “learning to code.”

But last month, I fell down a rabbit hole making music with Strudel the live-coding music environment and it hit me:

This is what programming used to feel like.

You type something.
It doesn’t work.
You tweak it.
You break it.
You tweak it again.
You finally get something that sounds terrible but you made it.

No AI filling in the blanks. No autocomplete producing symphonies for you. Just your brain, your rhythm, and a browser tab that occasionally screams because you asked it to play bd bd bd bd at 160 BPM.

🎵 Strudel Feels Like Creativity the AI Boom Tried to Erase

Look, I’m not anti-AI. I use GPT every day. It’s fast, it’s useful, and sometimes it even feels like magic.

But there’s something dangerous about learning programming entirely through it.

Before all this, you had to wrestle with a problem.
You had to think like a developer.
You had to understand why something worked.

Now people write:

“Explain to me what this code does so I can put it on my portfolio.”

And AI gives them a beautifully formatted explanation of code they never read.

Meanwhile, Strudel asks nothing from you except curiosity.
It doesn’t care about your resume.
It doesn’t care about your “prompt engineering.”
It doesn’t even care if you’re good.

You play around, live-code patterns, improvise, and fail loudly just like the old days of programming.

🎼 Live Coding Music Makes You Feel the Logic Again

When you write Strudel patterns like:

bd sd bd sd
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or

note("c4 e4 g4").slow(2)
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you’re not just typing commands; you’re thinking in structure.

You’re learning timing, cycles, transformations the same mental models that make someone a good developer, except far more fun than configuring another enterprise React app.

There’s immediate feedback.
There’s rhythm.
There’s play.
And honestly, I miss that in software.

AI has made everything “instant,” but instant doesn’t mean better.

Instant just means there’s no friction and friction is where you actually learn.

🥁 Why Strudel Matters in a World Obsessed With Prompts

The last three years turned the tech industry into a weird dystopia:

  • Bootcamps selling “Learn Python with AI in 30 days!”
  • Juniors using GPT to build projects they can’t debug.
  • Teams replacing onboarding with “just ask the AI, it knows the codebase.”
  • Everyone pretending productivity is going up while quality quietly dies in a corner.

But sitting there coding music in Strudel felt like a rebellion.

It reminded me that:

  • Creativity in programming comes from messing up.
  • Understanding requires effort, not autocomplete.
  • Making something is not the same as prompting something.

And most importantly:

If AI writes everything for us, creativity becomes performance not skill.

Strudel gives you a safe, fun, chaotic playground where you can break stuff, rebuild it, and hear the results immediately. You feel connected to the thing you’re making something that’s disappearing fast in tech.

🎹 Should You Learn Strudel?

Honestly?

Yes, if you want to remember what creativity feels like.

No frameworks.
No build steps.
No dependency hell.
Just your thoughts, your rhythm, and a browser that somehow turns text into music.

Strudel won’t get you hired.
It won’t replace Python.
It won’t fix your job hunt.

But it will make you feel like a real developer again, one who builds things, experiments, tinkers, fails, retries… not someone who just pastes whatever their AI tells them.

And in the chaos of the last three years, with layoffs, stack churn, and everyone pretending “prompt engineering” is a skill, maybe that’s exactly what we need.

What do you think?
Are we being replaced by prompt jockeys, or is this just another hype cycle?

And have you tried making music with code?
Because trust me, it’s a hell of a lot more fun than debugging CI/CD pipelines.

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