I think a lighter version of literate programming, coupled with languages that have a small API surface but are heavy on convention, is going to thrive in this age of agentic programming.

A lighter API footprint probably also means a higher amount of boilerplate code, but these models love cranking out boilerplate.

I’ve been doing a lot more Go instead of dynamic languages like Python or TypeScript these days. Mostly because if agents are writing the program, they might as well write it in a language that’s fast enough. Fast compilation means agents can quickly iterate on a design, execute it, and loop back.

The Go ecosystem is heavy on style guides, design patterns, and canonical ways of doing things. Mostly because the language doesn’t prevent obvious footguns like nil pointer errors, subtle race conditions in concurrent code, or context cancellation issues. So people rely heavily on patterns, and agents are quite good at picking those up.

My version of literate programming is ensuring that each package has enough top-level docs and that all public APIs have good docstrings. I also point agents to read the Google Go style guide [1] each time before working on my codebase.This yields surprisingly good results most of the time.

[1] https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/