Getting Started with Claude and Ruby:

Setting Up Your Environment

Posted on 3 July 2024
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Are you curious about integrating AI capabilities into your Ruby applications? Look no further! This tutorial shows you how to get started using Claude AI with ruby. Perfect for ruby devs looking to enhance their applications with AI capabilities.

  • Introduction to Claude AI assistant and the Anthropic API
  • Getting an Anthropic API key
  • Setting up Ruby and necessary gems
  • Introducing to claude-ruby gem
  • Basic examples using claude-ruby

Claude is a next-generation AI assistant developed by Anthropic. It's designed to be safe, accurate, and secure, making it an excellent choice for various tasks. While often compared to ChatGPT, Claude offers competitive performance and pricing, with the recently released Claude 3.5 Sonnet version showing impressive benchmark results.

To get started with Claude and Ruby, you'll need to follow these steps:

Obtain an Anthropic API Key

Visit the Anthropic Console (console.anthropic.com)
Sign up for an account if you haven't already

Generate a new API key
Save this key securely - you'll need it later!

Create a New Rails Application

rails new your_app_name
Add the claude-ruby gem to your Gemfile
# Gemfile
  
gem 'claude-ruby'

Run bundle install to install dependencies

cd your_app_name
bundle install

Set Up Environment Variables

You could use rails credentials for this, but I prefer to use dotenv gem

# Gemfile
    
gem 'claude-ruby'
gem 'dotenv'

Create a .env file and add your Anthropic API key

# .env
    
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"

Create an AI Agent Service

Set up a service class to handle API calls using the claude-ruby gem

mkdir app/services
touch app/services/ai_agent.rb
# app/services/ai_agent.rb
    
require 'claude/client'
class AiAgent

  def anthropic_api_key
    @anthropic_api_key ||= ENV['ANTHROPIC_API_KEY']
  end

  def claude
    @claude ||= Claude::Client.new(anthropic_api_key)
  end

  def format_claude_response(response)
    claude.parse_response(response) rescue "ERROR: Couldn't extract text from Claude response"
  end

end

Testing Your Setup

Once your environment is configured, you can test the integration using the Rails console:

Instantiate a new Claude client

claude = AiAgent.new.claude

Define a message to send to Claude

message = "Tell me a joke."

Use the messages method to make an API call

response = claude.messages(claude.user_message(message))

Parse the response to get the formatted text

y AiAgent.new.format_claude_response(response)

Claude offers additional features to customize your AI interactions:

  • System Messages: Provide instructions on how Claude should process requests
  • Model Selection: Choose between different Claude models
  • Response Parameters: Adjust settings like max tokens and temperature

These will be discussed in detail in the next article.

By following this guide, you'll be well on your way to leveraging the power of Claude AI in your Ruby applications. Stay tuned for more advanced topics and examples in future posts!

Examples from the video and article are available on github:
https://github.com/devgabcom/claude101

Claude with Ruby - Article 1
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2 3 4 5