This page maps the materials referred to in the accompanying letter. The hierarchy below indicates how the materials are related: primary research, the project context from which it emerged, and subsequent applications of the same line of work.
Indentation indicates contextual or project relationship, not a claim of strict historical or intellectual genealogy.
LETTER MATERIALS
│
├── Research developed from Knuth's "Literate Programming"
│ │
│ ├── Review / Preprint
│ │ ├── Canonical DOI
│ │ └── Source & companion repository
│ │
│ └── Prompt-Literate Workflow
│ ├── Methodology repository
│ └── Archived release DOI
│
├── Project context from which the work emerged
│ │
│ └── InterDead / Echo of an Unfading Memory
│ ├── Project context / extended About
│ ├── InterDead Wiki
│ └── InterDead Reference Library
│ └── Leibniz 1666 Conspectus
│
└── Related applications and subsequent work
│
├── IRONCREED Roadmap Editor
└── Code Constitution
A methodological review of Donald Knuth’s 1984 article and the WEB system. It reconstructs the original relationship between explanation, TANGLE, WEAVE, and executable code, then examines direct descendants, related executable-document workflows, reproducible environments, and the boundary case of LLM-assisted development.
An experimental methodology that grew out of the review while examining how literate-programming discipline might be preserved in LLM-assisted development. The LLM acts as a bounded executor or editor inside a human-authored structure: plan, chunk contracts, scenarios, validation, generated candidate artifacts, and TRACE.
The prompt itself is an operation over that structure rather than the source of truth, and generated output remains a candidate until it has been reviewed and deterministically checked.
InterDead is a psychologically oriented horror / speculative-fiction project centered on a “messenger for the dead,” memory, and forms of consciousness that may not be human. The project began as an application prototype and gradually developed into a game world, narrative system, and broader meta-universe.
This was the practical context from which our questions about language, narrative structure, formal systems, and eventually literate programming emerged.
A glossary of source terms and a brief working explanation of Leibniz’s 1666 Dissertatio de arte combinatoria. It belongs to the InterDead Reference Library and records one step in the project’s earlier investigation of universal language, formal combination, and systems of meaning.
An experimental architecture-planning tool inspired by literate programming. Its upper layer represents an architectural intention in human-readable form; the lower layer represents the route between intentions, named chunks, dependencies, and resulting artifacts.
Status: prototype not yet public.A portable governance and verification framework for software projects. It combines a project constitution, a fillable founding profile, derivative legislation, terminology, canonical-source rules, provenance, automated checks, assembly, and release procedures.
It belongs to the broader research line concerned with treating software not only as executable machinery, but also as a formally structured and verifiable system of statements, authority, and transformation.
Sam Starling
Zhovten Games
sam@zhovten.games
Research materials and project documentation are published through Zhovten Games repositories and associated archives.