I've never properly tried literate programming, overkill for hobby projects and not practical for a team unless everyone agrees.

Examples of code that needs comments in my career tend to come from projects that model the behaviour of electrical machines. The longest running such project was a large object oriented model (one of the few places where OOP really makes sense). The calculations were extremely time consuming and there were places where we were operating with small differences between large numbers.

As team members came and went and as the project matured the team changed from one composed of electrical engineers, physicists, and mathematicians who knew the domain inside out to one where the bulk of the programmers were young computer science graduates who generally had no physical science background at all.

This meant that they often had no idea what the various parts of the program were doing and had no intuition that would make them stop and think or ask a question before fixing a bug in wat seemed the most efficient way.

The problem in this case is that sometimes you have to sacrifice runtime speed for correctness and numerical stability. You can't always re-order operations to reduce the number of assignments say and expect to get the same answers.

Of course you can write unit and functional tests to catch some such errors but my experience says that tests need even better comments than the code that is being tested.