[atomic128]

I don't see the connection.

In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand.

LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.

[rixed]

Have you ever tried literate programming? In literate programming you do not write the code then present it to a human reader. You describe your goal, assess various ideas and justify the chosen plan (and oftentimes change your mind in the process), and only after, once the plan is clear, you start to write any code.

Thus the similarity with using LLM. Working with LLMs is quicker though, not only because you do not write the code but you don't care much about the style of the prose. On the other hand, the code has to be reviewed, debugged and polished. So, Ymmv.

[phba]

> In literate programming you do not write the code then present it to a human reader. You describe your goal, assess various ideas and justify the chosen plan (and oftentimes change your mind in the process), and only after, once the plan is clear, you start to write any code.

This is not literate programming. The main idea behind literate programming is to explain to a human what you want a computer to do. Code and literate explanations are developed side by side. You certainly don't change your mind in the process (lol).

> Working with LLMs is quicker though

Yes, because you neither invest time into understanding the problem nor conveying your understanding to other humans, which is the whole point of literate programming.

But don't take my word, just read the original.[1]

[1] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...