Live programming environments improve programmer experience by providing views of program execution which are continuously, and instantaneously updated. In most existing work on liveness, these views are considered part of the IDE: separate windows, panels, or widgets allow programmers to inspect and interact with live data and program execution. In this paper we present “live literals” where the source code itself is used as vehicle for immediate feedback and direct manipulation. Live literals are like ordinary programming language literals, but they are automatically updated after changes to the code. We illustrate the concept of live literals in Javascript using three applications: embedded spreadsheets, live units tests, and probes.