Make prototyping with Claude fast and easy.

This library is designed to make interacting with Claude fast and easy. It is primarily targeted toward people writing non-production, prototype code. It prioritizes developer ergonomics.

It speeds up lots of things that I frequently find myself doing with Claude.

• Generating a response to a user and system prompt alana.gen(user=..., system=...)
• Creating and/or extending a list of MessageParams alana.respond(message_content, role="user")
• Extracting content from Claude's output using Regex alana.get_xml(tag, content)
• Generate a prompt or a Python list of few-shot examples alana.gen_prompt & alana.few_shot respectively

I am alana :)

I tested these, and I've tried to make sure my code was idiomatic in all cases. Sorry if I messed up! Please open a GitHub issue if you catch a mistake.

Continuing a list of messages using Anthropic API (adapted from Anthropic API documentation):

import anthropic
from anthropic.types import MessageParam
messages = [
  MessageParam(
    role="user",
    content="Hello, Claude!"
  ),
]
output_text = anthropic.Anthropic().messages.create(
    model="claude-3-opus-20240229",
    max_tokens=1024,
    messages=messages
).content[0].text
messages.append(
  MessageParam(
    role="assistant",
    content=output_text
  )
)
print(messages)  # [{'role': 'user', 'content': 'Hello, Claude!'}, {'role': 'assistant', 'content': "Hello! It's nice to meet you. How are you doing today?"}]

Equivalent alana code:

import alana
messages = []
alana.gen(user="Hello, Claude!", messages=messages, model="opus", max_tokens=1024)
print(messages)  # [{'role': 'user', 'content': 'Hello, Claude!'}, {'role': 'assistant', 'content': "Hello! It's nice to meet you. How are you doing today?"}]

Also, equivalent alana code thanks to defaults:

import alana
messages = []
alana.gen(user="Hello, Claude!", messages=messages)
print(messages)  # [{'role': 'user', 'content': 'Hello, Claude!'}, {'role': 'assistant', 'content': "Hello! It's nice to meet you. How are you doing today?"}]

pip install alana

🎵 Note: I have been making new releases frequently. Make sure your package is up-to-date!

⚠️ Warning: This library is in active early development! No guarantees are made for backward compatibility. The library is NOT production-ready.

1. Import via import alana or, if you're brave, from alana import *.
2. Make your Anthropic API key available as an environment variable. os.environ["ANTHROPIC_API_KEY"] = "..."

The documentation for this project is hosted at utils.alana.computer.

• Programming is too slow! This is doubly true when you're interacting with LLMs. By building nice utilities with sane defaults, I hope to speed up my (and maybe your) workflow.
• I make trade-offs to speed up the developer experience:
  • I do not try hard to anticipate future upstream API changes. I'm also ok with breaking backward compatibility to make my functions more concise and more usable.
  • Usability > Principles. While I don't relish in it, I'm ok with breaking conventions designed for large production libraries if it speeds up programmers who use alana. The priority is to make the library intuitive and fast.
  • I don't try to serve every use-case.
• Simplicity is key. This library strives to be readable and straightforward.

• Easy color print: alana.red, alana.green, alana.blue, alana.yellow, alana.cyan. Try alana.green("Hello!")
• Easy pretty print with Sonnet (or an Anthropic model of your choice): alana.pretty_print. Try alana.pretty_print(t.arange(16, device='cpu').reshape(2,2,4))
• Make it easier to use the Anthropic API:
  • alana.gen, for easy Claude generations. Try alana.gen(user="Hello, Claude!"). You can pass in a messages parameter (a list of anthropic.types.MessageParams) either in place of or together with a user parameter.
  • alana.respond, easily appending a user message to a list of MessageParams!
  • alana.gen_examples, alana.gen_examples_list for generating few-shot examples.
  • alana.gen_prompt, for easy prompt generation (meta-prompt).
  • alana.get_xml, for using regex to get XML tag contents from model outputs. ⚠️ Regex parsing of XML may be unreliable!
  • alana.remove_xml to strip certain XML tag-enclosed content from a string (along with the tags). This is primarily intended to get rid of "..." strings. ⚠️ Regex parsing of XML may be unreliable!
• A bunch of aliases (Try: alana.few_shot, alana.n_shot, or alana.xml)

Welcome! Thank you for considering making a contribution to alana-utilities.

If you'd like to make a major refactor or breaking change, please open an Issue first. This way, I can review it to determine if it is within scope for this project.

There are no guarantees that your pull requests will be merged into the library. alana-utilities is essentially a hobby project, and there is currently only one maintainer.

In general, we follow the "fork-and-pull" Git workflow.

We are using Black for formatting and PyRight for type checking.

Before submitting a pull request, please run black . on your code. This saves us from failed CI runs.

To install and run Black:

  $ pip install black
  $ black .

To install and run PyRight:

  $ pip install pyright
  $ pyright .

There are simple tests written with unittest. I am working on extending the test suite.

You may need to provide your Anthropic API key as an environment variable to run all of the unit tests. See #10.

First install flaky plugin with pip:

$ pip install flaky

Next run:

$ python simple_tests.py

• Generating alternative prompts given a prompt
• OpenAI model support
• Support for automatic "are you sure"/"are you confused" multi-turn prompting
• Automatic error checking (are there mistakes in this code, sanity checking of model outputs)
• Automatic model-switching on rate limit
• Support for quick-and-dirty unit-testing with Claude!
• Prompt test case generation and easy prompt testing