# A new kind of literate program – Claudette
Jeremy Howard
2024-06-23

> *This is the 2nd part in a series on Answer.AI’s language model API
> libraries. For the first, see [Introducing Claudette, a new friend
> that makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet even
> nicer](https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-06-21-claudette.html).*

[Claudette](https://claudette.answer.ai/) is the first ever “literate
[nbdev](https://nbdev.fast.ai/)” project. That means that the actual
source code for the library is a rendered Jupyter Notebook which
includes callout notes and tips, HTML tables and images, detailed
explanations, and teaches *how* and *why* the code is written the way it
is. Even if you’ve never used the Anthropic Python SDK or Claude API
before, you should be able to read the source code. Click [Claudette’s
Source](https://claudette.answer.ai/core.html) to read it, or clone the
git repo and execute the notebook yourself to see every step of the
creation process in action.

> “*Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of
> programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a
> **computer** what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to
> **human beings** what we want a computer to do.*” Donald E. Knuth,
> [Literate
> Programming](https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programming/01-knuth-lp.pdf)
> (1984)

The reason this project is a new kind of literal program is because I
take seriously Knuth’s call to action, that we have a “*moral
commitment*” to never write an “*illiterate program*” – and so we have a
commitment to making literate programming an easy and pleasant
experience. (For more on this, see [this
talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX1yGxJijsI) from Hamel Husain.)

To learn all about how Claudette is made, and how to use the Anthopic
API on which it’s based, have a look at the video we just posted – as
you’ll (hopefully!) see, you can quickly build a deep understanding of
the code, and explore how it works by interacting with it directly:

<https://www.youtube.com/embed/p_8Zk6HUCV8>

This is the first video in our new “dev chats” series. We decided to
regularly record discussions of new work at Answer.AI in order to help
communicate progress within our team. But, as a Public Benefit Corp with
a mission to help society benefit from AI, that means it makes sense for
us to share them publicly too. Let us know in the YouTube comments if
you find this helpful, and have any questions or requests for the team.
To see all dev chats as they’re posted, you can use [this
playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8Zk6HUCV8&list=PLfYUBJiXbdtSPnX9IeYmwqTGBlkhAweAT),
which we’ll be using for all these recordings.