I originally wrote this code as I was developing a very large Jupyter application. Because the application was widget-based, I was spending a lot of time developing in notebooks, and then copy-pasting into the appropriate module in my package. This was tedious, and it also didn't take any advantage of all the didactic steping stones I was coding. So I started to develop solutions that allowed me to develop straight from notebooks and leave in code and markdown that made the codebase more like literature. I had written all the code in this repository - including all the stuff about literate programming - before I ever heard of nbdev. I really thought I was onto something big until I discovered the solution already existed (listening to a podcast about Jupyter)!
The independent discovery of this development environment really drives the point home for me that this is an incredibly intuitive and persuasive way to write software, as I argue in 01_literate_programming.ipynb and 02_literate_python_packages.