I agree with this. I've been a fan of literate programming for a long time, I just think it is a really nice mode of development, but since its inception it hasn't lived up to its promise because the tooling around the concept is lacking. Two of the biggest issues have been 1) having to learn a whole new toolchain outside of the compiler to generate the documents 2) the prose and code can "drift" meaning as the codebase evolves, what's described by the code isn't expressed by the prose and vice versa. Better languages and tooling design can solve the first problem, but I think AI potentially solves the second.

Here's the current version of my literate programming ideas, Mechdown: https://mech-lang.org/post/2025-11-12-mechdown/

It's a literate coding tool that is co-designed with the host language Mech, so the prose can co-exist in the program AST. The plan is to make the whole document queryable and available at runtime.

As a live coding environment, you would co-write the program with AI, and it would have access to your whole document tree, as well as live type information and values (even intermediate ones) for your whole program. This rich context should help it make better decisions about the code it writes, hopefully leading to better synthesized program.

You could send the AI a prompt, then it could generate the code using live type information; execute it live within the context of your program in a safe environment to make sure it type checks, runs, and produces the expected values; and then you can integrate it into your codebase with a reference to the AI conversation that generated it, which itself is a valid Mechdown document.

That's the current work anyway -- the basis of this is the literate programming environment, which is already done.

The docs show off some more examples of the code, which I anticipate will be mostly written by AIs in the future: https://docs.mech-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html