we_are_coded.by CODE · The world, decoded
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Basic

What is code

The BasicsUpdated on 16 August 2026we are coded

The computer doesn't think. It reads a recipe and follows it literally, even when the recipe is wrong.

Checked on16 August 2026
In short: code is text with instructions for the computer, written by a human. The computer doesn't understand what you're trying to achieve, doesn't guess, doesn't improvise. It just executes what's written, line by line, literally. So when an app messes up, it's not because the computer "got confused" about something. It did exactly what was written, even when what was written was wrong.

Imagine you order food through an app, the price on screen is one thing, and a different amount gets charged to your card. It's not magic, and it's not 'the computer glitched'. Someone wrote a line of text that tells the system what to do in exactly this situation - and the system executed it literally. The line was wrong - the result was wrong. The computer doesn't judge whether it seems reasonable. It has no opinion.

Code works like a recipe followed literally by a cook with no judgment of their own. If the recipe says 'pour in the salt', he pours in the entire salt shaker, because nobody wrote 'as much as needed'. People read recipes and sense when something sounds excessive. The computer doesn't sense anything. It executes exactly what's written, even when it's absurd.

That's where 'bugs' come from - the word programmers use for errors in code. A bug isn't the computer getting something wrong on its own. A bug is the moment a person wrote an instruction different from what they actually meant to achieve. The computer executed what was written perfectly. It's just that what was written wasn't the right thing.

An app - whatever it is, your banking app, the restaurant map, the thing you shop through - is built from this text. All of that text together is called the codebase. It's not one page. It's not one recipe. It's an entire cookbook, written by many people, with recipes that reference each other. Change something in one recipe, and the effect can pop up in a completely different part of the book - because the cook will still follow it literally.

The computer is never right or wrong. It's literal. The mistake is always human, written once and then carried out obediently, over and over, without the computer ever doubting it for a second.

This is where it's decided

When you hear 'there's a bug', don't think of a broken computer. Think of a cook following a recipe too literally, because the recipe didn't explain precisely enough what its author wanted.

I work right on this edge every day. When I build a system, I don't write magic, I write recipes, and I know the cook on the other side will do exactly what I wrote, even when I haven't thought of everything. So trust in software isn't trust in the machine. It's trust in how carefully the recipe was written.

The visual is generated code art. No third-party images.
Official primary sources
→MDN Web Docs: JavaScript first steps - what programming is (Mozilla)