If you directly[1] edited the bytes of a program, that is substantially different to if you got the source code from somewhere, edited that and recompiled it.

[1] Using a hex editor - not by waving a magnet at your harddrive or whatever.

That is better example.

Using the program analogy. Astra is looking at outputs of a program, and re-compiling it.

And this thread is kind of arguing over whether using Notepad is really programming, and others saying, Astra really used VSCode with some fancy plug-ins, so that isn't really programming.