The pen-plotter artist writes code that describes vectors. The machine reads the vectors and draws. It can’t feel the paper resist the nib, doesn’t know if the ink is bleeding, has no feedback loop from mark to instruction. The plots worth keeping are made by artists who chose materials that would misbehave in predictable ways — ink with a specific bleed radius, paper with a specific tooth. They don’t close the gap between code and physical mark — they become fluent in it.
Frederick Bachman says he spends eight hours a day locked in a room with people he made up. Real people have interiority you can’t control. Fictional characters have exactly the interiority you gave them, plus whatever arrived uninvited during revision. Eventually a character exceeds their specification. The novel is usually about that excess. Bachman doesn’t try to prevent this. He procrastinates until it happens.
A coding agent executes specifications. The gap between what you meant and what it did is where all the craft is. The CLAUDE.md is a record of gaps already fallen into. A scar map.
None of these practitioners close the distance between representation and execution. They learn its topography.