> Fair enough, I was partly following the existing files, although omitting `spec_helper` is my default style.

I'm a fan of keeping things as light weight as possible, too (assuming that's your reason for ommitting spec_helper), but my usual approach is to retain a `spec_helper.rb` and load it in every spec file, but keep it as minimal and light weight as possible -- in particular, it usually wouldn't load all of the app or gem code I'm developing.  We can't actually fully use that strategy within rspec's specs, though; it's a chicken and egg problem--given that we are using rspec to spec rspec, rspec needs to be fully loaded, because rspec itself isn't designed to work when only one file or a handful of files loaded.

Anyhow, the specific thing here that tipped me off is that I ran the spec in isolation (using my vim keybinding) and noticed that the output wasn't in color -- that's because `spec_helper.rb` sets that.  It also sets the rspec-expectations syntax to disable `should`, which is the main reason loading `spec_helper` is important -- without doing that, we could have an example that passes when run in isolation but fails when the whole suite runs if it used the `should` syntax.