There are some tasks that LLMs are good at, but which can be hard to do with traditional command line tools or scripts. This is true even when you are a skilled coder and expert in Shell scripting. Examples include summarization, judgement-based evaluation, formatting etc.
Executable markdown provides a method of building these tasks into traditional pipelines as small, single-task-focused, composable modules. They also have the advantage that they can be easily shared and re-used.
I’m still not clear on why a shell script with comments (shell being a very clear way to explain commands to executive) is not as good as a text file which then has some poor man’s shell superimposed on it.