Sounds like literate programming, popularized by Donald Knuth

I like that.

So many times I've looked at a peer's code and had a hard time reconciling what the comments and wiki articles said with what their code was attempting to do.

This mindset is probably a godsend to QA teams.

My father was convinced that Quark XPress was written that way: once they had the core functionality figured out, they wrote the manual, then implemented it.

The thing is - this is interesting because nobody is doing it anymore. Once everybody starts doing it, i.e. literally "human politics" gets directly involved on all levels of development, everybody would try to escape this style to get some development freedom for themselves to stay sane.