claude-nothing

A fake Claude Code session that looks incredibly productive but does absolutely nothing.

Inspired by install-nothing.

It's a real fullscreen terminal chat, styled after the actual Claude Code UI: the welcome banner, the todo checklist, the extended-thinking block, colored diffs, subagents, slash commands, !shell mode — all of it. Type any task and it thinks hard (✻ Reticulating…), reads files that don't exist, edits code that isn't there, spins up subagents to look extra busy, watches a test fail dramatically, fixes it heroically, and finishes with all tests green — while touching exactly zero bytes on your disk.

Perfect for:

• Looking busy on a screen share
• Impressing people walking past your desk
• Feeling productive without the burden of producing anything

Usage

Run it instantly, no install required:

uvx claude-nothing

Or install it as a tool:

uv tool install claude-nothing
claude-nothing

Working from a local checkout of this repo instead:

uv run claude-nothing

Type anything and press enter. Real slash commands work too: /help, /status, /cost, /clear, /compact... none of them do anything either. !command runs a fake shell command. Esc interrupts mid-turn, Ctrl+C twice exits.

Options

Examples

# Watch one demo turn play out, then exit
claude-nothing -t "rewrite the billing system in Rust"

# Infinite productivity, unattended — never waits for input
claude-nothing --loop

# The exact same nothing, every time
claude-nothing --seed 42

Piped into a file or another program (no real terminal attached), it falls back to printing one plain-text demo turn instead of the fullscreen UI.

What it actually does

0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Exactly as planned.