This does seem exciting at first glance. Just write the narrative part of literate programming and an LLM generates the code, then keep the narrative and voila! Literate programming without the work of generating both.

However I see two major issues:

Narrative is meant to be consumed linearly. But code is consumed as a graph. We navigate from a symbol to its definition, or from definition to its uses, jumping from place to place in the code to understand it better. The narrative part of linear programming really only works for notebooks where the story being told is dominant and the code serves the story.

Second is that when I use an LLM to write code, the changes I describe usually require modifying several files at once. Where does this “narrative” go relative to the code.

And yes, these two issues are closely related.