Thank you for this great and useful review!
Yes, the commands are read from the state of the buttons as soon as the execute-button is pressed. I even thougth about disabling this one, but not the others. I somehow like the idea of changing the program in between. This should be possible by spending some (or even many) of the robots power.
I initially planned a countdown for the programming-phase. somehow that plan got lost on the way.
And i really agree with the games pace. it should be faster.