Show HN: Rudel – Claude Code Session Analytics

140 pointsposted 2 days ago
by keks0r

68 Comments

dmix

a day ago

I've seen Claude ignore important parts of skills/agent files multiple times. I was running a clean up SKILL.md on a hundred markdown files, manually in small groups of 5, and about half the time it listened and ran the skill as written. The other half it would start trying to understand the codebase looking for markdown stuff for 2min, for no good reason, before reverting back to what the skill said.

LLMs are far from consistent.

cbg0

a day ago

Try this: Keep your CLAUDE.md as simple as possible, disable skills, and request Opus to start a subagent for each of the files and process at most 10 at a time (so you don't get rate limited) and give it the instructions in the skill for whatever processing you're doing to the markdowns as a prompt, see if that helps.

keks0r

a day ago

yes we had to tune the claude.md and the skill trigger quite a bit, to get it much better. But to be honest also 4.6 did improve it quite a bit. Did you run into your issues under 4.5 or 4.6?

dmix

a day ago

I was using Sonnet 4.6 since it was a menial task

emehex

2 days ago

For those unaware, Claude Code comes with a built in /insights command...

loopmonster

2 days ago

insights is straight ego fluffing - it just tells you how brilliant you are and the only actionable insights are the ones hardcoded into the skill that appear for everyone. things like be very specific with the success criteria ahead of time (more than any human could ever possibly be), tell the llm exactly what steps to follow to the letter (instead of doing those steps yourself), use more skills (here's an example you can copy paste that has 2 lines and just tells it to be careful), and a couple of actually neat ideas (like having it use playwright to test changes visually after a UI change)

hombre_fatal

a day ago

It gave you a couple neat ideas and you're complaining.

fragmede

a day ago

Some people just can't take a compliment, especially if it's generated. (I'm one of them.) Still, /insight did give useful help, but I wasn't able to target it to specific repo/sessions.

hombre_fatal

a day ago

Isn't it using the sessions in the cwd where you're running it?

keks0r

2 days ago

Ohh this is exciting, I kinda overlooked it. I assume there are still a lot of differences, especially for accross teams. But I immediately ran it, when I saw your comment. Actually still running.

evrendom

a day ago

true, the best comes out of it when one uses claude code and codex as a tag team

Aurornis

a day ago

> 26% of sessions are abandoned, most within the first 60 seconds

Starting new sessions frequently and using separate new sessions for small tasks is a good practice.

Keeping context clean and focused is a highly effective way to keep the agent on task. Having an up to date AGENTS.md should allow for new sessions to get into simple tasks quickly so you can use single-purpose sessions for small tasks without carrying the baggage of a long past context into them.

sethammons

a day ago

this jumped out at me too. What counts as "abandoned"? How do you know the goal was not simply met?

I have longer threads that I don't want to pollute with side quests. I will pull up multiple other chats and ask one or two questions about completely tangential or unrelated things.

I abandon sessions when I ask for something then it spins for a minute, fills up 40% of the context window and comes back with the totally wrong questions and I don't like the approach it took to get there. I don't answer any of the questions and just kill the session and start a new one with a different prompt.

longtermemory

a day ago

I agree. In my experience: "single-purpose sessions for small tasks" is the key

monsterxx03

14 hours ago

I built something in a similar space: Linko (https://github.com/monsterxx03/linko), a transparent MITM proxy with a webui that lets you see what's actually being sent between Claude Code and LLM APIs in real time.

  It's been really helpful for me to debug my own sessions and understand what the model is seeing (system prompts, tool definitions, tracing tool calls etc.).

c5huracan

13 hours ago

The "no meaningful benchmark for good agentic session performance" point resonates. Success varies so much by task type that a single metric is almost meaningless. A 60-second documentation lookup and a 30-minute refactoring session could both be successes.

Curious what shape the benchmark takes. Are you thinking per-task-type baselines, or something more like an aggregate efficiency score?

steve_adams_86

10 hours ago

Does this comply with Anthropic's terms? I've been developing small apps here and there on top of Claude Code and each time I find I'm too uncomfortable with their terms to bother distributing it.

swaminarayan

10 hours ago

26% of AI coding sessions are abandoned within 60 seconds .Is this a prompt problem, a tooling problem, or a limitation of current models?

alvarogar

10 hours ago

The main reason we've seen is a bad first impression: the agent misunderstands the initial prompt, doesn't load the available tools or starts doing something clearly wrong, and the user ctrl+c's instead of correcting it since it's faster to just start a new one.

The learning is that it is fixable. Better CLAUDE md instructions, clearer initial prompts, and skill configurations that reduce the uncertainty cut abandonment significantly in our team.

evrendom

10 hours ago

evren here from the rudel team. and that's a great question.. i genuinely dont know. let me find out

tmaly

a day ago

I have seen numbers claiming tools are only called 59% of the time.

Saw another comment on a different platform where someone floated the idea of dynamically injecting context with hooks in the workflow to make things more deterministic.

evrendom

a day ago

interesting, where did you see that?

lgvdp

17 hours ago

I see a lot of people with concerns about privacy and security. Not shown in the post, but the github shows how to self host. No need to use 3rd party, you can just have your own too

152334H

2 days ago

is there a reason, other than general faith in humanity, to assume those '1573 sessions' are real?

I do not see any link or source for the data. I assume it is to remain closed, if it exists.

keks0r

2 days ago

Its our own sessions, from our team, over the last 3 months. We used them to develop the product and learn about our usage. You are right, they will remain closed. But I am happy to share aggregated information, if you have specific questions about the dataset.

it's reasonable to note that w/o sharing the data these findings can't be audited or built upon

but i think the prior on 'this team fabricated these findings' is v low

marconardus

2 days ago

It might be worthwhile to include some of an example run in your readme.

I scrolled through and didn’t see enough to justify installing and running a thing

keks0r

2 days ago

Ah sorry, the readme is more about how to run the repo. The "product" information is rather on the website: https://rudel.ai

blef

2 days ago

keks0r

2 days ago

Our focus is a little bit more cross team, and in our internal version, we have also some continuous improvement monitoring, which we will probably release as well.

mentalgear

a day ago

> A local-first desktop and web app for browsing, searching, and analyzing your past AI coding sessions. See what your agents actually did across every project.

Thx for the link - sounds great !

KaiserPister

2 days ago

This is awesome! I’m working on the Open Prompt Initiative as a way for open source to share prompting knowledge.

keks0r

2 days ago

Cool, whats the link? We have some learnings, especially in the "Skill guiding" part of our example.

alyxya

2 days ago

Why does it need login and cloud upload? A local cli tool analyzing logs should be sufficient.

keks0r

2 days ago

We used it across the team, and when you want to bring metrics together across multiple people, its easier on a server, than local.

mbesto

a day ago

So what conclusions have you drawn or could a person reasonably draw with this data?

avilesrafa

a day ago

Hey, here is Rafa, another Rudel AI developer. The ultimate goal is to make developers more productive. Suddenly, we had everyone having dozens of sessions per day, producing 10X more code, we were having 10X more activity but not necessarily 10X productivity.

With this data, you can measure if you are spending too many tokens on sessions, how successful sessions are, and what makes them successful. Developers can also share individual sessions where they struggle with their peers and share learnings and avoid errors that others have had.

evrendom

a day ago

yes what rafa said... aaand we see who wastes the 200 bucks claude subscription by not using it

ekropotin

2 days ago

> That's it. Your Claude Code sessions will now be uploaded automatically.

No, thanks

keks0r

2 days ago

It will be only enabled for the repo where you called the `enable` command. Or use the cli `upload` command for specific sessions.

Or you can run your own instance, but we will need to add docs, on how to control the endpoint properly in the CLI.

tgtweak

2 days ago

Big ask to expect people to upload their claude code sessions verbatim to a third party with nothing on site about how it's stored, who has access to it, who they are... etc.

keks0r

a day ago

We dont expect anything, we put it out there, and we might be able to build trust as well, but maybe you dont trust us, thats fair. You can still run it yourself. We are happy about everyone trying it out, either hosted or not. We are hosting it, just to make it easier for people that want to try it, but you dont have to. But you have a good point, we should probably put more about this on the website. Thanks.

smallerfish

a day ago

> content, the content or transcript of the agent session

Does this include the files being worked on by the agent in the session, or just the chat transcript?

ericwebb

a day ago

I 100% agree that we need tools to understand and audit these workflows for opportunities. Nice work.

TBH, I am very hesitant to upload my CC logs to a third-party service.

evrendom

a day ago

you can host the whole thing locally :)

ericwebb

a day ago

I missed that important detail :) thanks

anthonySs

2 days ago

is this observability for your claude code calls or specifically for high level insights like skill usage?

would love to know your actual day to day use case for what you built

keks0r

2 days ago

the skill usage was one of these "I am wondering about...." things, and we just prompted it into the dashboard to undertand it. We have some of these "hunches" where its easier to analyze having sessions from everyone together to understand similarities as well as differences. And we answered a few of those kinda one off questions this way. Ongoing, we are also using a lot our "learning" tracking, which is not really usable right now, because it integrates with a few of our other things, but we are planning to release it also soon. Also the single session view sometimes helps to debug a sessions, and then better guide a "learning". So its a mix of different things, since we have multiple projects, we can even derive how much we are working on each project, and it kinda maps better than our Linear points :)

mentalgear

a day ago

How diverse is your dataset?

keks0r

a day ago

Team of 4 engineers, 1 data & business person, 1 design engineer.

I would say roughly equal amount of sessions between them (very roughly)

Also maybe 40% of coding sessions in large brownfield project. 50% greenfield, and remaining 10% non coding tasks.

bool3max

a day ago

Why is the comment calling out the biggest issue with this so heavily downvoted? Privacy is a massive concern with this.

lau_chan

2 days ago

Does it work for Codex?

keks0r

2 days ago

Yes we added codex support, but its not yet extensively tested. Session upload works, but we kinda have to still QA all the analytics extraction.

dboreham

a day ago

One potential reason for sessions being abandoned within 60 seconds in my experience is realizing you forgot to set something in the environment: github token missing, tool set for the language not on the path, etc. Claude doesn't provide elegant ways to fix those things in-session so I'll just exit, fix up and start Claude again. It does have the option to continue a previous session but there's typically no point in these "oops I forgot that" cases.

cluckindan

2 days ago

Nice. Now, to vibe myself a locally hosted alternative.

vidarh

2 days ago

I was about to say they have a self-hosting guide, but I see they use third party services that seem absolutely pointless for such a tiny dataset. For comparison, I have a project that happily analyzes 150 million tokens worth of Claude session data w/some basic caching in plain text files on a $300 mini pc in seconds... If/when I reach billions, I might throw Sqlite into the stack. Maybe once I reach tens of billions, something bigger will be worthwhile.

keks0r

2 days ago

There is also a docker setup in there to run everything locally.

vidarh

2 days ago

That's great. It's still over-engineered given processing this data in-process is more than fast enough at a scale far greater than theirs.

longtermemory

a day ago

From session analysis, it would be interesting to understand how crucial the documentation, the level of detail in CLAUDE.md, is. It seems to me that sometimes documentation (that's too long and often out of date) contributes to greater entropy rather than greater efficiency of the model and agent.

It seems to me that sometimes it's better and more effective to remove, clean up, and simplify (both from CLAUDE.md and the code) rather than having everything documented in detail.

Therefore, from session analysis, it would be interesting to identify the relationship between documentation in CLAUDE.md and model efficiency. How often does the developer reject the LLM output in relation to the level of detail in CLAUDE.md?

avilesrafa

a day ago

This is a great idea, documented and added to our roadmap.

vova_hn2

2 days ago

This is so sad that on top of black box LLMs we also build all these tools that are pretty much black box as well.

It became very hard to understand what exactly is sent to LLM as input/context and how exactly is the output processed.

keks0r

2 days ago

The tool does have a quite detailed view for individual sessions. Which allows you to understand input and output much better, but obviously its still mysterious how the output is generated from that input.