Play-by-Play

Replays every change Claude made in a turn, shell edits included.

Use it

• After a turn that changed files, a hint shows above the prompt: 4 edits · 3 files · +38 −12 · press r or /replay, with a Replay and a Hide button. r and x press them once the band has the keyboard (click it, or ctrl+x tab).

• /replay opens a pane on the latest turn. /replay <n> opens an earlier one: 1 is the latest, up to 10 turns that changed files are kept.

• The pane shows, top to bottom:

  • a scoreboard: files touched, lines added and removed, edit count, and the file with the biggest change;
  • a jump list of the files, numbered 1-9 in the order they were first changed;
  • Prev, Next and Close, and "Step 2 of 5";
  • the step: file name, what happened (edit, write, create, delete, rename, cell), +/− counts, via shell when a command made it, and the diff with removed lines red and added lines green.

• Keys while the pane has the keyboard (it takes it when /replay opens it):

  Key	Does
  n / down arrow	next step
  p / up arrow	previous step
  1-9	first change of that file
  q, Esc	close
  left / right arrow	previous / next, after a click on the pane's "Keys" line

  The mouse wheel and Page Up / Page Down still scroll a long diff.

Settings

None.

What it can touch

• Reads: the records the Edit, Write and NotebookEdit tools return (the text before and after). It never opens a file itself.
• Runs: around each Bash call, read-only git commands in the session's folder: git rev-parse, git diff, git ls-files --others, git hash-object (without -w), git show <HEAD>:<path>. Each has a 5 second limit. Nothing is staged, stashed, committed or written.
• Writes: nothing. It never reverts or edits a file. What it records lives in the session's memory and is gone when the session ends.
• Network: none. Model calls: none.

Limits

• Shell changes need a git repository at the session's folder. Elsewhere commands run unwatched.
• Files git ignores (node_modules, build output) are not tracked, by design.
• An untracked file a command changes or deletes shows as a step without lines, since git kept no earlier copy, unless a file tool wrote that file earlier in the session.
• A file you save in your editor while a command runs shows as a change "via shell".
• A command run in the background is compared when it starts running in the background, not when it ends.
• If one command's git snapshots take over 2 seconds (a very large repository), shell tracking turns off for the rest of the session and the transcript says so once. File tools are still tracked.
• Up to 25 changed files are compared per command; the rest are counted in one "more files" step. A step draws at most 400 diff lines; a turn keeps at most 300,000 characters of diff and 500 steps. Counts always cover the whole change.
• Up and down step through changes only when the terminal sends them as scroll keys to the focused pane, and left and right need a click on the "Keys" line first. VS Code and the mobile app have no key line: use the buttons there. The band shows on the terminal and the desktop app only.
• r in the prompt box types an r; it presses Replay only once the band has the keyboard.

Built from a prompt

This mod was built from prompts/play-by-play.md.