March 6, 2026
Now playing: code, chaos, and comments
Show HN: Claude-replay – A video-like player for Claude Code sessions
Press Play on Your AI Coding Chat — Fans Cheer, Skeptics Shrug
TLDR: A new tool turns Claude Code AI sessions into a single interactive web replay you can share. Commenters split between “neat but why?” and “love the polish,” with calls for Slack-friendly video exports and geekier formats—hinting that how we document AI-assisted work is becoming a real battleground.
A community dev just dropped “claude-replay,” a tool that turns AI coding chats into a single, shareable web page you can play like a video. No bulky screen recordings, no messy logs—just click, watch, and scrub through the action. It even lets you hide secrets, add bookmarks, change themes, and toggle the AI’s “thinking” view for that behind‑the‑scenes peek. Not affiliated with Anthropic, but definitely courting attention.
Then the comments lit up. One camp asked the ultimate vibe-check: “Cool… but why?” As dinkleberg put it, watching AI session replays “doesn’t seem particularly useful,” yet still tipped the hat to the slick execution. Others were delighted by the craftsmanship—smy20011 cheered that it’s not “vibe coded,” and BloondAndDoom summed up the mood with, “don’t know if I’ll ever need it, but super cool.”
Feature requests turned into friendly drama. prideout wanted to drop it into Slack, hinting a plain video export might beat a web file for quick sharing. bestouff pitched a nerdier spin—make it an asciinema style terminal replay “for geek points,” and open the code. Meanwhile, the “thinking blocks” toggle sparked curiosity: do we really want to replay an AI’s inner monologue? Whether you’re documenting a bug, teaching, or flexing on your blog, this tool fueled a classic internet split—practicality vs. pure cool factor—and the hot takes are half the fun.
Key Points
- •claude-replay converts Claude Code JSONL session logs into a single, self-contained interactive HTML replay for easy sharing and embedding.
- •It supports playback controls, speed adjustment, collapsible tool calls and thinking blocks, bookmarks/chapters, secret redaction, and multiple themes.
- •Transcripts are read from ~/.claude/projects/ and include user messages, assistant responses, tool calls/results, and thinking blocks with timestamps.
- •Installation is via npm or zero-install with npx; CLI options allow filtering by turns or time, customizing labels/titles/themes, and controlling minification/compression.
- •The generated player includes play/pause, step navigation, a progress bar, speed control, toggles for thinking/tool calls, keyboard shortcuts, and built-in themes (default: tokyo-night).