claude-devtools is a visual debugging application that reads Claude Code's locally saved logs and session transcripts and presents their hidden details. Developers use it to inspect tool inputs and outputs, file activity, token usage, subagents, context consumption, and team coordination. The catalogue entries add commands, hooks, agents, instructions, and settings for the tool.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to matt1398/claude-devtools. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matt1398/claude-devtools/main/.claude/commands/devtools/explain-visible-context.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/matt1398/claude-devtoolsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/commands/matt1398/claude-devtools/explain-visible-context)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/matt1398/claude-devtools/explain-visible-context"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/matt1398/claude-devtools/explain-visible-context/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/matt1398/claude-devtools/explain-visible-context"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/matt1398/claude-devtools/explain-visible-context.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00057 | $0.01291 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00023 | $0.00516 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00258 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00129 |
Grade A, and why
claude-devtools:explain-visible-context scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 105 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Present the following explanation directly to the user. Output the full content below as your response — do not summarize, ask follow-up questions, or treat this as background context.
Visible Context
What It Is
"Visible Context" is the portion of Claude's context window that we can identify and measure. Every time Claude processes a turn, its context window fills with various pieces of information — your messages, file contents, tool outputs, thinking, and more. Visible Context tracks what we can attribute to a known source, so you can see where your tokens are going.
What We Track (6 Categories)
CLAUDE.md Files
Memory files that Claude loads automatically at the start of every session and after each compaction. These include:
- Global CLAUDE.md (
~/.claude/CLAUDE.md) — your personal instructions across all projects - Project CLAUDE.md (
.claude/CLAUDE.mdorCLAUDE.mdat project root) — project-specific instructions - Directory CLAUDE.md — instructions scoped to subdirectories (e.g.,
src/renderer/CLAUDE.md)
These are injected repeatedly (once per compaction phase), so their token cost accumulates. A 500-token CLAUDE.md file injected across 3 compaction phases costs ~1,500 tokens total.
@-Mentioned Files
Files you reference with @path/to/file in your messages. When you mention a file, Claude Code injects the full file contents into the context. Large files consume significant tokens — a 1,000-line source file could use 5,000+ tokens per mention.
Tool Outputs
Results returned from tool executions: file reads (Read), command output (Bash), search results (Grep, Glob), and others. Every tool result stays in the context window until compaction. A Bash command that prints 500 lines of output or a Read of a large file both count here.
Thinking + Text Output
Claude's own output that consumes context:
- Extended thinking — Claude's internal reasoning (when thinking mode is active). This can be substantial for complex tasks.
- Text output — Claude's visible responses to you. Longer explanations and code blocks use more tokens.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago First seen · 105 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 712e127aad10
claude-devtools:explain-visible-context is a command published in the GitHub repository matt1398/claude-devtools (3,994 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,291 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other commands, from other repositories
synthesise-reviews
Deduplicate and reconcile multiple completed review reports into one prioritised revision plan with conflicts and dependencies made explicit. Use when parallel reviewers have returned findings that need a single action sequence. Not for running the reviews; use $review-cluster.
firebase-publish
Create or reuse a Firebase project, configure Hosting, and deploy the current static site. Never deletes.
scan
Scan AWS account for cost optimization.
setup
Diagnose-first project setup with state machine — scans, confirms, interviews, writes.
hypothesis
Generate hypotheses and define how to test them.
speckit.tasks
Generate an actionable, dependency-ordered tasks.md for the feature based on available design artifacts.