Tried #Claude as spicy search-and-replace this week to extract ViewComponents in Rails, and it was pretty good!

At a guess my pair saved 0.5–1 day not doing manual text replacement, extracting 50-ish instances from inconsistent markup.

Learned e.g. that requesting side-quests offhand did not work well, and that it’s worth thinking through how it can verify correctness to further reduce manual effort.

@maxim Yeah, this was Claude Code in a terminal! Don’t have much experience with other tools to compare it to, yet.

I briefly tried the Zed agent UI and rather liked how it visualised changes inside the actual editor, but in my very limited experiment with whatever model I picked (I think a ChatGPT one?), having it find the appropriate files itself didn’t work so well.

@maxim 👍 I could see myself using another editor (than Vim) for agentic renames/refactoring – I’ve considered it anyway for non-agentic global search-and-replace since it’s a Vim weak spot.

Depends a bit on the bigger workflow as well. This past week I had Claude do all the replaces and then I went through and validated each, which felt inefficient. Getting each in front of myself in an editor might speed things up. Though I could have Claude pause while I do so in a split.

@m1foley @maxim Thanks! Got a video or example or similar? I use a :Qdo command sometimes, but it is a bit fiddly, and Vim’s quirky regex dialect still slows me down.

https://thepugautomatic.com/2012/07/project-wide-search-and-replace-in-vim-with-qdo/