Co-Writing with an LLM: Critical Code Studies and Building an Oxford TSA App
David M. Berry Figure 1: Final version (2.5) of the Oxford TSA QM In the field of critical code studies, we seek to understand how software code, as a technical and cultural object, shapes our world. In contrast to thinkers like Friedrich Kittler, who argued that media technologies determine our situation , here I analyse the co-constitutive logic, structure, and materiality of code in conjunction with the co-creation capabilities of generative AI (Kittler, 1999; Berry 2011). As Marino (2020) argues, "code means more than merely what it does; we must also consider what it means". However, this has potentially been a painstaking process of reading and interpreting complex and often historical codebases. Today, however, I find myself at a new juncture. With the emergence of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) we can develop new ways to engage with code, not just as an object of study, but as a medium for collaborative creation and study. In this article I look at the creatio...