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Comment by brandonkal

1 day ago

[dead]

A couple more you may find interesting:

1. Xc [https://xcfile.dev/] - an md-based task runner

2. Literate [https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate] - a literate programming tool

  • Thanks, I hadn't seen either of those. It's good to see other projects leveraging runnable markdown, as it has a lot of potential.

    I like the literate programming tool. I've always liked experimenting with Jupyter notebooks, and I can see running markdown directly as replacing a lot of the ad hoc things I use them for.

    It would be great to see Anthropic add support directly to Claude Code, and OpenAI to Codex. I think this sort of literate scripting will become more common this next year, especially as model reliability improves and the tool-use gets smarter.

I wrote this to list/run named markdown blocks from README.md files, etc:

https://github.com/skx/runme

It's a trivial project, but it has been useful for reference and documentation a time or two.

(Though I guess a Makefile would be the obvious alternative; that too is often a collection of named drivers/recipes within a project.)

  • Thanks, the runme tool looks useful. You could use that along with this approach for testing. Being very meta, it could extract the code blocks from your executable markdown files to test they run correctly as part of the unit tests for a markdown test suite!

Thanks, it is definitely an underutilized concept. I think Pete Koomen is right that we will see many more tools adopt this approach. And I hope that Claude Code and Codex add direct support for this themselves too.