Show HN: Claude-replay – A video-like player for Claude Code sessions

Show HN: Claude-replay – A video-like player for Claude Code sessions github.com/es617/claude-r...

I got tired of sharing AI demos with terminal screenshots or screen recordings.

Claude Code already stores full session transcripts locally as JSONL files. Those logs contain everything: prompts, tool calls, thinking blocks, and timestamps.

I built a small CLI tool that converts those logs into an interactive HTML replay.

You can step through the session, jump through the timeline, expand tool calls, and inspect the full conversation.

The output is a single self-contained HTML file — no dependencies. You can email it, host it anywhere, embed it in a blog post, and it works on mobile.

Repo: https://github.com/es617/claude-replay

Example replay: https://es617.github.io/assets/demos/peripheral-uart-demo.ht...

Question: how can you find the exact session you are looking for, among hundreds of them? I had a look at my ~/.claude/projects/*/ and I couldn't even find my last session.

d4rkp4ttern · 8 days ago

I had exactly this problem and didn’t see anything good out there (Claude —resume only searches session names and auto-created titles) so I got a tool built that uses a Rust/Tantivy full text search index. It’s part of the aichat command suite, called “aichat search”:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/aichat/...

It brings up a nice TUI for filtering and further actions. There’s also a —json flag so agents can use it as a CLI search tool to find context about any past work. There’s a plugin that provides a corresponding session-searcher agent that knows to use this tool to search sessions.

I have hundreds/thousands of past sessions and this has been a life saver; I can just ask the main agent, “use the session searcher agent to get the details of how we built the tmux-cli tool so we can add some features”.

es617 · 9 days ago

Ha, good question. Short answer: I often let Claude Code find it.

Sessions are grouped by the folder where you ran Claude Code (e.g. ~/.claude/projects/Users-<user>-<path>), so if you don’t run everything from the same directory, it’s usually easy to narrow down.

They’re also plain JSONL files, so grep works well if you remember part of a prompt.

That said, it might be nice for claude-replay to add a helper command to list or search recent sessions.

minixalpha · 9 days ago

In your last session, use "/status" to show your session_id, then find your session file in "~/.claude/projects/[your_project]/[session_id].jsonl"

rahimnathwani · 9 days ago

I'm curious what people here use for sharing agent coding sessions with colleagues? I'm sure we can learn from each other, but there's no perfect tool.

The ones I've used which can convert coding session histories into readable HTML are:

https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts (only works with Claude Code)

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/coding_agent_session_se... (supports many coding agents but the tui feels kind of clunky and it only exports one session at a time)

bestouff · 9 days ago

I would have made a "claude2asciinema", for geek points. Also an opencode version.

Ha, I like the claude2asciinema name! I did think about asciinema-style output, but I wanted the player to expose the structured steps rather than just replay the terminal output. Supporting other agent CLIs could definitely be interesting.

kami23 · 9 days ago

I just added a Claude alias that calls Claude with flags wrapped in asciinema. Only annoying thing is that people have wanted video or gifs and the conversion has been annoying a few times. Will fix it later.

dbgrman · 9 days ago

This is amazing for getting new team members onboarded with Claude Code processes and tools I use. Thanks for working on it. will give it a try tonight.

prideout · 9 days ago

Neat. Would be nice if I could easily drop the replayer into a slack thread. Maybe a video file would be better for that than an HTML file?

Good point. The reason I went with HTML is that you can expand tool calls, inspect prompts, jump around the timeline, etc., which would be hard to preserve in a video.

But you’re right that sharing in places like Slack could be easier with a video preview. Something to think about.

phanarch · 5 days ago

Do you think this can be used as an observability tool? does claude code logs the LLM reasoning?

swaminarayan · 6 days ago

How are people sharing reproducible AI coding sessions today? Screenshots and recordings never capture the full interaction.

andreagrandi · 9 days ago

zxspectrum1982 · 8 days ago

Does it work when using Claude inside Cursor? Or is there some something like claude-replay but for Cursor sessions? (I'm out of home, can't try now)

es617 · 8 days ago

good question. Currently, it works with standalone Claude code or Claude code via VSC extension (both terminal and chat). Cursor stores JSONL logs, too, but no tool calls or timestamps. I'll add support for it soon; it will be a bit less informative, and playback pacing will be heuristic, but it's a good addition.