CUE Does It All, But Can It Literate?
CUE is the Swiss Army knife of file generation. It is the tool you grab when you need to generate complex JSON, validate YAML, or generally stop configuration files from ruining your life. It slices, it dices, it ensures your integers are actually integers. But guess what else it can be? It turns out, it is also a surprisingly effective Literate Programming tool.
This is important because, let’s be honest, the current king of this hill is org-mode . And while org-mode is powerful, it is also a bit of a golden cage. It works perfectly as long as you never leave the Emacs ecosystem. But the moment you try to export a workflow to a colleague who uses VS Code, you realize you have accidentally signed up for vendor lock-in. You want your documentation - your “literate code” - to be portable, not a magic spell that only works inside one specific editor.
The “Frankenstein” Problem
When you write about code - whether it is a blog post, a tutorial, or internal docs - you rarely show one giant, boring file. That puts people to sleep. Instead, you break it down. You show a snippet of the logic. Then a snippet of the config. Then maybe a piece of the CSS. You stitch these disparate body parts together with prose.
The problem is what I call the “Copy-Paste Tribute”.
Let’s say you write a brilliant tutorial. You copy your working code into the Markdown file. Then, three days later, you realize you named a variable t instead of timeout . You fix it in the source code. But did you fix it in the Markdown file? Probably not. Now your readers are copying broken code, your tutorial is lying to them, and you look like you don’t know what you are doing.
CUE solves this by letting us define “parts” and then stitching them together programmatically. It does not just hold the text; it validates that the pieces actually fit. It ensures that the code in your explanation is the exact same code in your final build. It is like having a Lego set where the bricks refuse to click if you are building something structurally unsound .
The Basic Engine
So, how do we stop paying this tribute? We treat our document like a build target.
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