Getting started with Claude Code, on MacOS, with chruby and rspec – Bibliographic Wilderness

I’ve been writing ruby and rails for nearly 20 years. A couple weeks ago, I had gotten code snippets from copy-paste in a chat window, but I hadn’t even experimented with Claude Code or similar “can write code to your file system” tools. I know some people are now using LLM’s to write all their code, which I’m not excited about, but I decided I couldn’t hold off any longer, and I had to at least understand how it worked to be able to decide when/where to use it. Everything in here is probably (?) old news for people already way into using LLMs to write code. I decided that a project to speed up my rspec test suite (using the amazing test-prof for profiling and performance patterns!) was a great first application of it — because it will probably involve both analysis and writing many files, if nothing else Claude is probably great at editing many files according to my instructions doing much more than a regex grep can do (yes, indeed it was great at this).