I don't think "interspersing commands and their output with prose" is meant to provide a robust solution that should replace "automation tool like Puppet or Che

I don't think "interspersing commands and their output with prose" is meant to provide a robust solution that should replace "automation tool like Puppet or Chef". This looks to be a step-up from just manually tinkering with commands in some shell to figure out or explore what it is you need to declare.