> what project is the person working on? - what "feature" are they working on? - what are they trying to achieve at this very moment?
I used to do a bunch of livecoding myself, actually.
I agree with you that most programming does not lend itself too well to livecoding. But there is one niche that I believe lends itself extremely well to live coding.
This niche being whiteboard programming questions/interview practice.
In this niche, the whole point of the exercise is to work on self contained problems that can be solved within 30 minutes, and to talk out loud to your audience the entire time.
Was pretty fun when I was doing it. I was doing it mostly for practice, and now I work at twitch because of it.
And if I ever create my own startup, it will probably be something like "running a recruitment firm on twitch, by getting people to do interviews live".
Edit: Videos of my old stream are here: www.twitch.tv/stale2000/videos