Added blog post about Claude workflow

Author: Jython1415

_posts/2025-04-06-copy-files-for-claude.md

@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@
+---
+title: "How to copy projects for Claude"
+categories:
+  - Blog
+tags:
+  - Programming
+  - Tech
+  - Python
+  - MacOS
+  - Claude
+  - AI
+---
+
+*This is meant to be an explanation of my workflow for providing Claude with context about specific Python packages so that I can ask questions about it. Note that this workflow is best suited for smaller packages because not all packages will fit into Claude's context window. I wrote it for my brother.*
+
+## The Toolkit
+
+The main thing I want to get across is that using `files-to-prompt` is a great way to quickly grab context about a bunch of files in a folder and provide it to an LLM. I also pair this with `ttok` because that tells you the number of tokens that that's going to take when it's provided to the chatbot, and there are limits to how much they can actually read.
+
+Usually, I'll make a query with `files-to-prompt` and see how many tokens that takes before I pipe it into `pbcopy` instead, so that I get it copied, and then I can take it over to Claude and paste it into its context.
+
+## Basic File Selection with `files-to-prompt`
+
+If I need to be more granular about what files I'm selecting, I have two courses of action. The first is to use the built-in file selection mechanisms that come with `files-to-prompt`.
+
+Typically, if you want to include all the files, you might do something like:
+
+```bash
+files-to-prompt .
+files-to-prompt --include-hidden .
+```
+
+The first one selects all the non-hidden files in the current directory. The second also includes the hidden files.
+
+If I'm working with Python files specifically and I just want to select the Python files in a directory, then I would specify the extension that I want to select for:
+
+```bash
+files-to-prompt -e py .
+```
+
+## A Complete Workflow Example
+
+Let me break down step-by-step how I might get access to and then get a copy-paste version of a Python package that I need to ask Claude questions about:
+
+```bash
+$ git clone https://github.com/Westwood-Robotics/PyBEAR.git
+Cloning into 'PyBEAR'...
+remote: Enumerating objects: 244, done.
+remote: Counting objects: 100% (48/48), done.
+remote: Compressing objects: 100% (44/44), done.
+remote: Total 244 (delta 10), reused 18 (delta 2), pack-reused 196 (from 1)
+Receiving objects: 100% (244/244), 66.22 KiB | 105.00 KiB/s, done.
+Resolving deltas: 100% (137/137), done.
+
+$ files-to-prompt -e py PyBEAR | ttok
+19885
+
+$ files-to-prompt -e py PyBEAR | pbcopy
+```
+
+In the first step, I clone the project I'm interested in. In the next step, I use `files-to-prompt` and select for the Python file extension and pipe that into `ttok` to see how many tokens it would take up in the context window. 20k is less than Claude's limit, so I know that it's safe to move forward with this. The final command, `pbcopy`, copies the output so that I can paste it later.
+
+## Advanced File Selection with `fd`
+
+There are a number of tools that you can use to improve this workflow. For example, instead of using the file selection tools provided by `files-to-prompt`, which are pretty rudimentary, you can use a slightly more sophisticated file selection tool called `fd`. The output from `fd` can be piped into `files-to-prompt` because `files-to-prompt` is designed to be able to do that.
+
+Here is a working example:
+
+```bash
+$ fd --type file "\.py" PyBEAR
+PyBEAR/examples/set_position.py
+PyBEAR/examples/spring2damper.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/CONTROL_TABLE.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/CRC.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/Manager.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/Packet.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/TIMING_TABLE.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/__init__.py
+PyBEAR/pybear/__main__.py
+PyBEAR/setup.py
+PyBEAR/useful_tools/ID_Setup.py
+PyBEAR/useful_tools/Search_N_Change_ID.py
+PyBEAR/useful_tools/bulk_comm_freq_test.py
+PyBEAR/useful_tools/ping.py
+
+$ fd --type file "\.py" PyBEAR | files-to-prompt | ttok
+19885
+
+$ fd --type file "\.py" PyBEAR | files-to-prompt | pbcopy
+```
+
+In this example, I use `fd` so that I can see the files I'm selecting before I go and read their contents with `files-to-prompt`, and the advantage of this is that I can scan the list and see if there's something that I want to exclude beforehand. This example doesn't showcase some of the more advanced selection tools that `fd` has available to it, but I'm not going to get into that in this write-up.
+
+## Installing the Tools
+
+I'm going to cover how to do this on the Mac, and I think you can figure out with assistance from Claude how to adapt this for other platforms as necessary.
+
+The core tools in this workflow, `files-to-prompt` and `ttok`, are distributed as Python packages and can be installed with the Python package manager (and much more), `uv`.
+
+To install `uv`, look up how to install `uv` because I don't want to include instructions in here that might become outdated.
+
+Once you have `uv` installed, you can install the tools with `uv tool install <toolname>`:
+
+```bash
+uv tool install files-to-prompt
+uv tool install ttok
+```
+
+`pbcopy` is what you can use on Mac (and I think on Unix more generally) to take something and copy it. I'm not sure what the equivalent is on Windows.
+
+`fd` is an optional portion of this guide, so I won't be including download instructions. In my setup, I install it with homebrew (command `brew`), the package manager for macOS (and Linux).
+
+## Example
+
+[Claude chat where I ask questions about PyBEAR](https://claude.ai/share/5efbdc62-ab54-4e8d-b117-5f86b0d7c509)
+
+*If you encounter any issues with this workflow, I recommend troubleshooting with Claude.*