Source code is not virtuous on its own. It liberates only in proportion to the time we have to reverse it. From something I wrote recently:

The code is an artifact, the leftover cocoon of the program being written.
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I would like, as much as possible, to have tools for exploring the shape of a process as it lives, exploring the data it operates on, and understanding the constraints of the problem, rather than relying on code to understand one specific approach to solving that problem.