Spotlight shows what your Claude Code/Codex are doing
Details
- External ID
- 48545168
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Spotlight shows what your Claude Code/Codex are doing
- Website domain
- backplanes.com
- Launched
- June 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4952185792349727
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hola HN!Long time lurker, sometimes commentor, first time poster here. I’ve been working alongside my two co-founders and a few colleagues on a project I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share with you all!Like many of us, I’ve lived a tortured existence with AI coding (is it vibes?) over the past few months - I think November was a big moment with this. But, one thing I’ve noticed after building orchestration layer after orchestration layer is that the thing I always came back to was “what the hell is Claude Code actually doing?” Perhaps it’s because of the time Claude Code got confused and “rm -rf”’ed root, or the time it deployed a feature flag flip to prod instead of stage, or the time it got stuck in a cycle of doom logging in with playwright, etc etc - but it inspired us to build this tool; we call it Spotlight by Backplanes.Spotlight takes your Claude Code and Codex sessions and finds security issues, things that could be sped up, and where you’re burning your time and tokens. We also create fun little archetypes of what kind of builder you are.The way it works: you install a backplanes CLI daemon/TUI that takes your Claude and Codex sessions, scrubs them of their PII and secrets locally, sends them to us where we do a second level scrub using a locally hosted model, and store your sessions row level encrypted with customer keys. Today we create and store the customer keys in AWS secrets manager, which we can’t access directly. Doing this work hosted lets us stitch sessions across machines and multiple harnesses and even gives you the ability to give team-level patterns. Details are at https://backplanes.com/trust.You can see an example report at https://backplanes.com/features/session-reports, To play with this, it's a one-line CLI install (yes, there's a signup, I'm sorry), and it's free at backplanes.com. In the coming weeks we will be releasing a Powershell version along with native MacOS and Windows apps.Please let us know what you all think. Thanks guys and gals!Nick
Enrichment
- Theme
- Claude integrations and coding agents
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- observability for claude and codex calls
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While an audit UI and basic proxy logger are straightforward to vibe-code, building a comprehensive runtime policy enforcement engine across local MCP servers, CLI commands, and host network activity requires deep systems and security integration.
What it would actually take: A production implementation requires a local proxy daemon or eBPF/OS-level hooks (macOS Endpoint Security, Linux eBPF/auditd) that intercept MCP JSON-RPC messages, subshell executions, and outbound network traffic without introducing latency or breaking dev workflows. It needs an evaluation engine running deterministic policy rules and an event ingestion pipeline streaming session data to a cloud dashboard. The hard parts are seamless, unbypassable agent interception across different operating systems and developer environments.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 395 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #212 of 396 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 227 days after the earliest competitor.
- Cockpit for you Claude Code agents in Rust · hn · 2026-08-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Spotlight by Backplanes · ph · 2026-06-10 · 395 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Abralo · hn · 2026-07-08 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Bestie, a coding agent that respects you · hn · 2026-09-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Nori CLI, a better interface for Claude Code (no flicker) · hn · 2026-01-14 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- AI Pulse a fake LED strip beside the macOS Dock that shows agent status · hn · 2026-08-10 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- How well do you use Claude Code? · hn · 2026-07-24 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Agent Flow: A beautiful way to visualize Claude Code actions · hn · 2026-03-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.