6 posts
Literate programming promises a single source of truth, but manual weave and tangle steps break the CI/CD pipeline.
If your build pipeline cannot run without you opening a terminal and typing , you do not have a literate program. You have a diary with a compiler attached.…
I spent 30 days writing design explanations before asking an LLM for code. The results changed how I think about rubber-ducking.
Most developers use LLMs backwards. We describe what we want in five words, get 200 lines of code back, and spend the next hour debugging assumptions the model…
Literate programming keeps documentation, tests, and implementation in sync by making a Markdown file the single source of truth.
Your docs, tests, and code are three files telling the same story badly. You update the function signature in the source. You forget the README example. A week…
LLM conversations contain intent, rejected alternatives, and working code. That's exactly what documentation should be.
You spent forty-five minutes with Claude designing a retry circuit. You explained the failure modes, rejected exponential backoff because it hides cascading…
Every compiler sees your code as a tree, but your editor lets you edit raw text.
Every programming language has a formal grammar. Your compiler reads it, builds a parse tree, and rejects anything that doesn't fit. Your editor ignores the…
Literate programming promised that code should be written for humans first and machines second. Four decades later, almost nobody writes that way.
In 1984, Donald Knuth published a paper that proposed a radical inversion. Programs should not be written for compilers and annotated for humans. They should…