We Should Revisit Literate Programming in the Agent Era

Literate programming is the idea that code should be intermingled with prose such that an uninformed reader could read a code base as a narrative, and come away with an understanding of how it works and what it does. Although I have long been intrigued by this idea, and have found uses for it in a couple1 of different cases2, I have found that in practice literate programming turns into a chore of maintaining two parallel narratives: the code itself, and the prose. This has obviously limited its adoption.

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