Fourteen years ago, Bret Victor argued that creators need an immediate connection to what they make. Clojure already lived it: the REPL, then Figwheel and shadow-cljs in the browser. But it stops at the rendered page: you can change the code and watch the page update, yet you can't point at something on it and ask which Clojure form made it. Render Hiccup to HTML and the div forgets it was ever Clojure code on a line. Three clicks deep? Grep and guesswork.

This talk builds the other half: a source inspector wiring your app, browser, and editor into one loop. Hover an element and the editor jumps to the Hiccup that made it. Put your cursor on a view and the element lights up, definition told apart from call site.

It's surprisingly little code. We build it live, end to end, so you can wire the same loop into your own server-rendered Hiccup app.

Patrick de Kruif

Patrick de Kruif has built software in Clojure professionally for the past five years, and tinkered with it longer still as a side interest before that. His work is mostly web applications backed by databases, and pretty much everything around them. From schema and UI through to CI, deployment, and the devops that keeps it all running. He's happiest working on interactive systems, with a weakness for small, sharp tools over large frameworks.