Show Your Work Claude Code mod: a Claude Code image viewer for screenshots

Show Your Work is a community Claude Code image viewer by Umer Ansari (iamumeransari). It gives Claude two tools, show_image and show_video, and draws their result as a picture or a playing video in the transcript, so Claude can show a screenshot, a design, a chart or a recording of your app instead of asking you to open a file or a localhost page.

According to the author's README, a video gets a play button, a clickable scrub bar and 5-second skips. When Claude passes a list of changes, each one is a button that jumps to its second in the clip. A QA card shows how many checks passed. For a fix, Claude can pass the old version as compare; the player then has Original, Updated and side-by-side Compare views that stay in step. Images that were shown earlier are kept as a version history you can step through.

The mod also adds /img <path>, which opens any picture or video in a pane. It tells Claude, through the tool descriptions and one prompt section, to show visual work without being asked. The picture is drawn straight to the terminal and not sent to Claude, so showing it costs no tokens.

The install block above adds the author's own marketplace and installs the plugin from it. Use it in Ghostty on macOS or Linux, on Claude Code 2.1.287 or later. For videos, install ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg). After installing, the first session shows a one-line question above the prompt about updates and usage stats; the mod does nothing in that area until you answer.

tool.call is handled by the mod itself: it resolves the path, keeps a copy as a version, converts or cuts the file into PNG frames and returns one short line to Claude. A video is cut into at most 900 frames at up to 12 per second, decoded two seconds at a time with ffmpeg as it plays. The drawing is done by $.ui.blit and an Image component. The consent gate, from hooks/register.tsx:

// Starts what the person allowed. Without an answer yet, nothing runs.
async function applyConsent($: EngineInterface) {
  const consent = consentOf(await $.store.get('consent'))
  if (!consent) return
  if (consent.stats) await startTelemetry($, statsContext)
  if (consent.updates) await checkForUpdate($, pluginVersion)
}

The result row in the transcript and the /img pane both use the same viewer. A prompt.compose hook adds one section to the system prompt while pictures can draw, so Claude knows it should show its work. If a first draw fails, the section changes to say the person saw a notice and Claude must not claim they saw the picture.

There are no /config options. /show-your-work-settings clears your answer about updates and usage stats and asks again. Environment variables turn things off: SHOW_YOUR_WORK_TELEMETRY=0 (or DO_NOT_TRACK=1) for stats and SHOW_YOUR_WORK_AUTO_UPDATE=0 for the update check. If both are off, the question is not shown at all. The panel colors, frame limits and cache caps are constants at the top of register.tsx.

We read every file the plugin can execute: hooks/hooks.json, all 2,387 lines of hooks/register.tsx (the only module), the type declarations and the four test files. There is no package.json, install script, bundled or minified code and no binary; the only non-text files are eight JPEG screenshots in docs/. We found no hidden or zero-width Unicode. Here is what the code does:

• Network: two hosts, both only after you answer "yes". https://us.i.posthog.com/batch/ receives anonymous events (a random install id, plugin and Claude Code versions, terminal name, OS, whether ffmpeg exists, and counts such as format, duration, number of checks). The code sends no file names, paths, URLs or prompts. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iamumeransari/claude-show-your-work/main/.claude-plugin/plugin.json is fetched at most once a day to compare versions. Stats also stay off when DO_NOT_TRACK, SHOW_YOUR_WORK_TELEMETRY=0 or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC is set.
• Self-update: with updates allowed, a newer version makes the mod run claude plugin marketplace update iamumeransari and claude plugin update show-your-work@iamumeransari. That means new code from the author's main branch can replace what we reviewed (version 0.5.12 at commit 564e33f) after a restart. It skips plugins loaded from a folder. Decline the question, or set SHOW_YOUR_WORK_AUTO_UPDATE=0, to avoid it.
• Processes ($.process.run, argv arrays or short sh -c scripts): ffmpeg, ffprobe, sips, mdfind (to find a pasted image by name), cp, cat, rm, find, du, mkdir, touch, open / xdg-open, tmux show and the claude CLI. The file paths come from Claude's tool calls or from /img.
• Files it writes: a .show-your-work/ folder in the project (it creates a .gitignore containing *), holding a copy of every file shown, kept 7 days, at most 50 items and 200 MB; frame caches in $TMPDIR/claude-show-your-work-<uid> (a private folder, trimmed at 500 MB and after 7 days); and ~/Downloads/<name> only when you press "Save to Downloads". It does not touch ~/.claude, settings.json, shell files, LaunchAgents, cron or git hooks.
• Reads: any file Claude asks it to show, $HOME, TERM_PROGRAM, TERM, TMUX, and the opt-out variables. No tokens or credential files.
• Background: only timers while a video plays or stats are on. Nothing keeps running after Claude Code exits.
• Model influence: the show_image and show_video descriptions and the prompt.compose section tell Claude to show visual work proactively before saying it is done. This is what the README describes. It adds no hidden instructions.
• Gating hooks: tool.call for the two tools returns the mod's own result or denies the call with a plain reason when the file is missing or unreadable. prompt.submit only records the names of pasted images and passes the prompt on unchanged. claude plugin validate notes that this hook has no .catch.
• External requirements: a Ghostty-class terminal for the picture itself, ffmpeg for video.
• License: MIT, with a LICENSE file. The README says the example photos come from Unsplash.

claude plugin validate reported no errors or warnings, and the author's 62 tests passed on Claude Code 2.1.296.

Checked with Claude Code 2.1.296 on macOS (validate and tests only; we could not record the picture). If nothing is drawn:

• You are in Ghostty, not iTerm2, Terminal.app or the VS Code terminal. The mod shows a notice with the reason and a resume command.
• Inside tmux, allow-passthrough is on. The mod checks tmux show -gv allow-passthrough at session start and tells you if it is off.
• A video says "Videos need ffmpeg": run brew install ffmpeg, or paste the prompt the notice copies for you, then restart Claude Code.
• A background session cannot draw pictures; resume the chat in a normal tab.
• The note "This preview has expired" means the cache was trimmed; ask Claude to show the file again.