Literate programming failed because people treated long essays as the source of truth instead of testable artifacts.

Make prose runnable and minimal: focus narrative on intent and invariants, embed tiny examples as doctests or runnable notebooks, enforce them in CI so documentation regressions break the build, and gate agent-edited changes behind execution and property tests like Hypothesis and a CI job that runs pytest --doctest-modules and executes notebooks because agents produce confident-sounding text that will quietly break your API if trusted blindly.