claude-theater 0.1.0

Watch your Claude Code subagents work — a live office for every conversation.

🎭 Claude Theater

Watch your Claude Code conversations and subagents work — a live office, in real time.

_{The demo office (claude-theater --demo): conversations and subagents at work, each agent walks in, sits, head-bobs while it types, then confetti on finish. A community visualizer for Claude Code — not affiliated with Anthropic.}

Try it now, no Claude Code session required — pipx run claude-theater --demo spins up the office above with synthetic agents.

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Claude Theater reads the journals Claude Code writes for your conversations and the subagents they spawn, and renders them as a live office: every conversation is a room (titled by its subject), and inside it the conversation itself plus each subagent is a little character at a desk — avatar, name, the tool it's using right now, and a timer. Click any character to read its full task and result. When an agent finishes: confetti, a chime, and it quietly steps off the floor — and each room has its own show-finished toggle, so you control the history per conversation.

The UI is bilingual — English by default, Hebrew one click away (the choice is remembered, and the layout flips to RTL). Adding another language is a single edit to the I18N table in claude_theater.py; the server stays language-neutral.

Quick start

Zero install — run it straight from PyPI with pipx:

pipx run claude-theater

Or install it:

pipx install claude-theater   # or: pip install claude-theater
claude-theater

Or run from a clone (pure standard library, nothing to install):

python -m claude_theater

Then open http://localhost:7333. On Windows you can also just run start.cmd, which launches the server and opens your browser.

Requires Python 3.9+ and a Claude Code install that writes journals under ~/.claude/projects/.

VS Code extension

Prefer it inside your editor? vscode-extension/ packages Claude Theater as a VS Code extension: it runs the server in the background (start/stop it from a status-bar button) and opens the office in an interactive panel — no separate terminal. The server is bundled into the extension, so it works without a separate install. Build a .vsix with @vscode/vsce (cd vscode-extension && npx @vscode/vsce package) and install it from the Extensions view.

How it works

• Polls the journals Claude Code already writes — both the session files (your conversations) and **/subagents/agent-*.jsonl (the subagents they spawn). Claude Theater only reads them; it never starts or controls agents.
• A single adapter, parse_agent_event(line) -> Event, is the only code that touches the raw journal format. Everything else consumes the stable Event, so a Claude Code format change is absorbed in one place.
• Degrades, never crashes: corrupt lines are skipped (and counted), unknown keys are ignored, and an agent missing fields still shows up instead of vanishing.
• A non-blocking version banner appears when a journal comes from a Claude Code version this build hasn't been tested against — output may be partial, but the office keeps running.

Privacy

Your journals contain real conversation content, so Claude Theater is built to keep them on your machine:

• Binds to 127.0.0.1 only — never reachable from the network.
• Never transmits anything anywhere. No telemetry, no remote calls.
• The committed fixtures/ are 100% synthetic — no real prompts or results.

Development

python -m unittest discover -s tests   # golden parser tests, zero dependencies

The tests run synthetic journal fixtures through the adapter and fail loudly if the format drifts. Contributing a journal sample from a new Claude Code build is the most valuable contribution — scrub every prompt and result first.

Compatibility

Tested against Claude Code 2.1.x. Newer builds will trigger the version banner; please open a format-drift report with a scrubbed sample so we can add a fixture and an adapter case.

License

MIT © 2026 Asaf Abramzon. "Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic; this is an independent, community project for Claude Code.