The Importance of Sketching with Code

Gorilla Sun makes the case that sketching with code — small, exploratory programs that conjure visuals onto a canvas — is not a lesser form of "real" work but a fundamental creative practice in its own right. Creativity, he argues, decomposes into ideas, and ideas are the raw building blocks out of which new work is assembled like Lego.

The essay's central metaphor is the seed. A sketch doesn't just produce today's output; it plants an idea that may "carry fruit" years later. He borrows Zach Lieberman's notion of having a sense of time — ideas develop across the span of an entire body of work, not a single project — and recounts his own experience of returning to an old irregular-grids algorithm and, with "just one step further," unlocking an entirely new output space. From this he derives the essay's sharpest line: sketching is a practice where you're solving problems that you don't have yet.

Two further themes follow. First, thinking in systems: with the rise of long-form generative art, the goal shifts from curating a single output to designing an entire output space, where "the system itself becomes the artwork" — a lineage he traces back through Vera Molnar, who began with a system even before she worked with computers. Second, the dialogue with the machine: a sketch is an ongoing conversation in which the computer's flawed interpretations — never exactly what you wanted — are what push the work forward, "just like steering a very complicated vehicle."

He closes on happiness. In an age of shrinking attention spans, coding is "an incredibly effective antidote" — flow state, an empty canvas, and a ctrl+z for every mistake. The one practical lesson: after losing a sketch his mother preferred ("those were basically gone forever"), he now keeps track of the random seed.