Literate Programming and Claude

There’s an old concept called Literate Programming. It never stuck or took off, but it came back to me the other day. Here is the Wikipedia explanation.
My summary of this approach is to write a program (source code) as if it were a chapter in a book — primarily text and diagrams, interspersed with bodies of code. Hold that thought.

My latest use of Claude Code has yielded some impressive stuff. For the first time I am working with neural networks for image processing and object identification. I am using a camera, the Oak‑D‑Lite, which has a neural‑net processing chip in the camera itself, thereby offloading a lot of the processing from the attached Raspberry Pi 5. Oak‑D‑Lite is accessed with the DepthAI package.

Amazingly, Claude.ai knows DepthAI and the camera and neural nets a lot better than I do. With extensive instructions from me it has written code that works and uses these APIs in very granular ways. I ask it to document the code and it does a nice job of it.