New comment by c0rp4s in "We should revisit literate programming in the agent era"

c0rp4s — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:12:54 +0000

You're right that you can't test comments, but you can test the code they describe. That's what reproducibility bundles do in scientific computing ;; the prose says "we filtered variants with MAF < 0.01", and the bundle includes the exact shell command, environment, and checksums so anyone can verify the prose matches reality. The prose becomes a testable claim rather than a decorative comment. That said, I agree the failure mode of literate programming is prose that drifts from code. The question is whether agents reduce that drift enough to change the calculus.

New comment by c0rp4s in "Reasoning models struggle to control their chains of thought, and that's good"

c0rp4s — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:08:29 +0000

What strikes me is the finding that controllability decreases with longer reasoning --- suggests CoT monitoring gets more reliable in complex, multi-step tasks where scheming would be hardest to catch from outputs alone. The question is whether this holds as models get better at instruction following generally.

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New comment by c0rp4s in "We should revisit literate programming in the agent era"

New comment by c0rp4s in "Reasoning models struggle to control their chains of thought, and that's good"