TheLocal

Resident Claude Code expert subagents ("locals"), contributed by the gems an app uses. Any gem or app declares the locals that know its conventions; the_local aggregates the locals of an app's installed providers into its .claude/agents/, plus a delegation rule so the app's agent actually uses them.

A "local" is a Claude Code subagent that knows one gem's conventions cold. The host's orchestrating agent delegates that gem's work to it, so usage stays consistent instead of drifting.

Installation

Add it to your Gemfile:

gem "the_local"

or install it directly with gem install the_local. To track an unreleased change, point at the repo instead:

gem "the_local", github: "DYB-Development/the_local"

The gem's core is Rails-free. bundle exec the_local install and the the_local:check/the_local:refresh rake tasks work without Rails; a Rails host can equivalently use the bin/rails g the_local:install / the_local:provider generators.

Once installed, the locals themselves know the rest — the the_local-info, the_local-install, and the_local-develop agents explain, set up, and drive the_local, so this README stays short on purpose.

Usage

There are two sides.

Consuming app — install the locals of the app's direct dependencies (and the app's own) into .claude/agents/, and write the delegation trigger:

bundle exec the_local install

Install copies each provider's committed .md verbatim — no provider code is loaded — so every app on the same gem version gets a byte-identical local. Re-run it (or rake the_local:refresh) after a bundle install/update to re-sync.

Provider gem — contribute the locals an app installs. A gem declares its public interface in the_local/interface.yml and commits the three locals authored from it, the_local/agents/<gem>-{info,install,develop}.md; it ships no Ruby. rake the_local:author writes those locals against the declaration and the gem's current code, and rake the_local:check fails if they document more or less than was declared — so the docs never drift from the source. Wire the tooling with:

bin/rails g the_local:provider

See PROVIDERS.md for the full provider guide, including the manual steps for non-Rails gems.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/DYB-Development/the_local.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.