See What Your AI Coding Agent Is Actually Doing with Claude Tap
You've probably had that moment where an AI coding agent does something unexpected, and you have no idea why. Maybe it called a tool you didn't expect, or it suddenly lost track of context. You're left guessing what happened inside the black box. Claude Tap is a local proxy and trace viewer that lets you inspect exactly what your agent is sending and receiving — every system prompt, tool call, and streaming response, all captured on your machine.
What It Does
Claude Tap sits between your CLI-based AI coding agent and its API endpoint, recording all the traffic that passes through. It works with a wide range of agents including Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Kimi CLI, OpenCode, Pi, Hermes Agent, Cursor CLI, Qoder CLI, Antigravity CLI, and CodeBuddy CLI. You run your CLI through Claude Tap, and it captures the full conversation history, tool schemas, tool calls, tool results, reconstructed streaming responses, token usage, and request diffs.
The tool writes each run as a local trace session. You can then open that session in its built-in viewer, which supports both light and dark modes. The viewer shows you the exact context your agent is working with, and it includes a structured diff feature that compares adjacent requests side by side. If you need to share a trace with someone else, you can export the session to a self-contained HTML file that works without any server.
Why It's Cool
The value here is straightforward: debugging AI agents is notoriously hard, and Claude Tap makes it visible.
You see the exact context. Not just what the agent said, but the full system prompt, the message history, every tool definition, every tool result, and the reconstructed streaming response. When your agent goes off the rails, you can see exactly what it was working with.
The diff feature is genuinely useful. AI agents build context across multiple turns, and subtle changes in that context can cause big behavioral shifts. The structured diff across adjacent requests lets you pinpoint exactly which prompt, message, tool, or parameter changed between calls. That's the kind of evidence that turns guesswork into debugging.
Everything stays on your machine. There's no hosted dashboard, no data sent to a third party. Common auth headers are redacted automatically before recording. If you're working with sensitive codebases or proprietary prompts, that's a meaningful advantage.
It works across many clients with one workflow. You don't need a different tracing tool for Claude Code versus Codex CLI versus Gemini CLI. Claude Tap handles all of them, which is convenient if you switch between agents or work on a team that uses different tools.
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