Red/green/refactor & spikes

I've developed a new way of coding new functionality. In the past I distinguished between spikes and production code development. The spike was meant for prototype code, throwaway code.

Today I do it like this:
I start with a new test that has some basic code that will do the basics of the job i'm after. I can very easily run this test from my IDE (IntelliJ in my case). After a while the test(s) will succeed. This proves that I understand the basics of the code needed. Next step is to move some code to the main folder - to production level. I will use Extract methods refactoring to do this.

This way I slowly, but steadily move from prototype to production without redoing work.