9 NEW Claude Mods that can truly change how you work

Author: Jay E | RoboNuggets · Watch on YouTube

Video authored by the channel shown, not by IANIA; all rights belong to the creator. Transcript and summary generated automatically; the original-language content is preserved.

Original language: English

Original video: 9 NEW Claude Mods that can truly change how you work · Channel: Jay E | RoboNuggets · 12:23 · Watch on YouTube

Topics: AI agents, Task and workflow automation, Claude Code, Software engineering with AI

Summary

The video introduces Claude Code mods: add-ons that can change its interface and behavior, and explains how they differ from skills and connectors. Jay presents nine mods for monitoring progress, customizing the display, surfacing important information, tracking files and costs, preventing risky actions, saving feedback, browsing, and replaying edits. He also explains how to create and customize mods with Claude Code’s built-in plugin authoring skill, and how to save a useful mod as a plugin for future sessions. Mods generally do not add costs by themselves, though those that use a model in the background consume Claude usage.

Key points

Mods run inside Claude Code and can change what users see or how the application behaves; they are distinct from skills and connectors.
Savvy Progress displays task progress and details about sub-agents, including their models, progress, and estimated API costs.
Claude Skins changes the appearance of tool calls and edits, with themes and custom design options.
You Should Know uses a second agent to flag important details, but may increase token usage.
File Tree shows which files Claude is viewing or changing, while Cache Tax estimates the cost of sending a prompt when the prompt cache is cold.
Blast Radius pauses risky commands and requires a person to review affected files and confirm before deletion.
Reflect can turn user feedback into a persistent rule in a Claude.md or skill file.
Terminal Browser lets terminal users view web pages and GitHub pull requests alongside their chat; Replay Theater steps through edits made during a turn.
Claude Code must be version 2.1.287 or newer to use mods; a mod Claude creates is temporary by default unless saved and installed as a plugin.

Chapters

Start	Chapter	Summary
00:00	What Claude Code mods are	Jay introduces mods, explains how they differ from skills and connectors, and describes how they can alter Claude Code.
02:02	Progress, appearance, and alerts	The video covers Savvy Progress, Claude Skins, and You Should Know, including their benefits and trade-offs.
06:10	File visibility and usage costs	Jay explains how File Tree tracks file activity and how Cache Tax helps estimate prompt costs and keep a cache warm.
08:14	Safety, feedback, and browser tools	The video presents Blast Radius for reviewing risky operations, Reflect for saving feedback as rules, and Terminal Browser for viewing web content beside the chat.
10:49	Replay, setup, and saving mods	Jay demonstrates how Replay Theater works and explains the version requirement, mod creation, hot reloading, plugin installation, and usage costs.

Quotes

A mod is just a small add-on that basically changes how Claude Code looks and how it works. — 00:30

You just describe what you want and Claude builds it out for you. — 03:36

an actual human has to be in the loop to press proceed before any of the files get deleted. — 08:45

when you find one that you like, ask Claude to save it as a plugin and install it — 11:19

Concepts and entities

Claude Code, mods, Savvy Progress, Claude Skins, You Should Know, File Tree, Cache Tax, blast radius, Reflect, Terminal Browser, Replay Theater, Anthropic

Full transcript (original language)

00:00 So, Anthropic just shipped one of the biggest Claude Code updates we’ve ever had, and they’re calling it mods. The idea is simple. If you can describe a feature that you wish Claude Code had, it can now build that feature into itself. So, Claude Code can become almost any tool that you need. And in this video, I’ll walk you through the nine mods that are genuinely worth installing and tweaking so that by the end of this, you can master Claude mods and make full use of them to make your systems smarter and faster. And if you’re new, my name is Jay. I spent over a decade working with brands as you

00:30 probably know, have been in AI since my masters in data science, and now I’m leading our AI business in one of the largest AI communities globally. But first, what are mods? So, a mod is just a small add-on that basically changes how Claude Code looks and how it works. It came out on the 1st of October, and if you’ve updated Claude Code to the latest version, then it’s already switched on for you and ready to use. It works in the Claude Code terminal and in the code tab of the desktop app. But at the time I’m recording this, it doesn’t seem to be available yet in the VS Code extension. So, make sure you’re using it

01:01 inside Claude Code, in the terminal or the desktop app. Now, you might be thinking, if you already have skills and you already have MCP connectors, then how are mods different? Well, a skill basically just tells Claude how to do a job. It’s like a handbook for a certain tasks, right? And a connector just plugs Claude into another application. But a mod runs inside Claude Code and actually changes it. So, it can change exactly what you see on screen. So, if you want Claude Code to have extra buttons, a side panel, or even a mini game to play while Claude is working, that’s all

01:32 entirely within the realm of possibilities. And making a mod is really easy because all you need to do is to ask Claude. I’ll show you a few examples so that by the end of this video, you’ll have a clear idea of what mods to use or tweak for your setup. And every one of these, by the way, I put into this PDF guide, which you can just send that straight to Claude, and you can have your agent grab these or customize them to your liking. And it’s just a matter of asking your agent to set them up for you. So, But link for that is just in the description below if you need it. But for now, here are the ones I’ve tried, I’ve liked, and think will be useful for you as well. Number

02:02 one is Savvy Progress. Now, I really like this one because it’s the right mix of being useful while also being quite fun and delightful. Now, what it does is it puts a progress bar above your prompt so you can see how close Claude is to finishing your task. But for heavier, longer tasks where a team of sub-agents is doing the work, it also shows you a live panel of every sub-agent. If that’s new to you, sub-agents are basically these helper Clauds that your main agent can spawn, and each one of them basically takes a piece of the larger job. And for each helper, you can see

02:33 its model, how far along it is, and roughly what it’s costing you in API credits. Now, that’s already useful by itself, but the even better part is that you can actually customize how these little pixel Claude crabs look. So, if you want one that looks like a designer, you can do that. If you want one that looks like a developer, you can do that, too, just by asking Claude to customize their looks. So, apart from giving you more information about your work, especially long-running tasks that are done better with helper agents, it just makes using sub-agents a much nicer experience with this view. Now, you might be curious, how does a mod

03:04 actually change what’s on your screen? Well, every time Claude does something like running a command, for example, Claude code actually sends out a little signal called an event, and a mod is just a small piece of code that listens for those events so that when one comes through, the mod can do one of three things. It can watch that event, it can change it, or it can handle it itself. Savvy Progress actually uses all three, so it watches every time Claude starts a helper, and every time that helper asks the model to do something, it notes the model, the tokens, and roughly what it costs, and it changes your view so that it draws the area above your prompt, it

03:36 adds its progress bar, and also shows you that side panel if you’re using sub-agent. And when you open the agents panel, it draws that whole panel by itself, including all your custom Claude mascot crabs. And the good news is you don’t need to know any of this to make one mod. Claude code actually comes with a built-in skill now for building them. So, you just describe what you want and Claude builds it out for you. Number two is Claude Skins. Now, this one is really simple, but it’s probably one of the very first mods that you can try without really changing your workflow. Because what it does is reskin how Claude Code

04:07 shows its work. So, your tool calls gets their own icons, your edits can show up in a specific color if you want. Right now, this open-source repo comes with seven themes like Noir and Tokyo Night. But, because this is Claude Code, you can give it pretty much any design system or color palette that you want and you can just have it build it out. So, if you’re looking for a great first mod that is quite safe to start with, then this is a good candidate because it only changes the display and you can customize it to fit your setup. Number three is You Should Know. This mod is actually built by Entropic themselves

04:37 and it runs a second agent on the side that reads what Claude writes and flags anything important that you might miss. Now, that’s pretty crucial, especially when Claude gives you a wall of text as an output, which more often than we’d like to admit, we don’t actually read in full. In my testing, I asked Claude Code to generate a video with a model like Kling and it flagged that I should probably know how much that would cost if I ran it through Key AI, which is the provider that I use. If that was buried in a wall of text, I might not have seen it. But, with this little pop-up, it lifted the important point right out.

05:08 And you can steer what it looks out for, by the way. So, if you’re more worried about costs, customer issues, or anything your automations might miss, you can tweak this mod to surface that. Do note that this particular mod, it does run a second agent, so it can increase your token usage. But, for a lot of mods that I’ll mention here, most of those are actually run using deterministic code. So, they don’t really require you to use an LLM in order to run them. And by the way, if you want to learn how to build and sell AI systems that businesses actually pay for, then that’s pretty much all we do over at the Robo Nuggets community. Where not only do you get access to the

05:40 Claude Living Masterclass, which we update every week and takes you from zero to mastery with the latest on AI, but you also get access to our Agents as a service course, which walks you through how to actually get paid for all these AI skills that you are learning. You also get to be part of a genuinely great community of AI builders. In fact, you can see just some of the recent wins our members are getting from the program right here. So, if you want to start earning from AI, then check that just in the pinned comment below. Now, back to the video. Number four is file tree. So, this is one example where it doesn’t really cost any tokens to run, because

06:10 what it does is just give Claude Code a really nice file panel on the right that shows exactly which files Claude is working on, which matters most, especially when you’re working on real software. Because when you’re working in production code, it’s important to know exactly what Claude is reading, editing, or changing. With this mod, a file shimmers in the tree when Claude is touching it, and when the change is committed, meaning it’s saved, it turns green. So, at a glance, you always know exactly which files Claude is working on. And if you’re not a developer, it’s still useful whenever you’re working across lots of files. To give one

06:42 instance, let’s say you’re preparing a tax filing with multiple documents. With this mod, you can see exactly which ones Claude has opened and which ones it has changed. And it gives you a much nicer UI instead of relying on a chat reply that you always need to read every time in order to get the gist of what your agent just did. It’s much more interactive and in my view, much easier on the eye. Number five is cache tax. Now, this is a mod that can actually save you money. Because if you don’t know what the prompt cache is, it’s basically this short-term memory that

07:12 Claude keeps during your conversation. And it keeps that short-term memory so that it doesn’t have to reread the whole conversation that you have with it every time that you send a prompt. So, it’s there to stop your tokens from being burned. But after a while, usually about an hour on a normal Claude subscription, it goes cold. And once that prompt cache is cold, the next prompt that you send actually makes Claude reread your entire conversation, which can really eat into your usage limits. So, what cache tax does is stop you before a message that

07:44 would cause you to reload your entire conversation and show you an estimate of what that would cost in tokens and API credits. So, you know exactly how much you’ll spend before you hit send. That really matters in long sessions because the bigger or longer your conversation is, the more that that one message would cost. And if you’re stepping away, you can actually type {slash} keep warm as part of this mod or you can just have the mod turn it on for you by default. And what it does is it will ping the session with a tiny message right before the cash goes cold, so it’s still warm

08:14 when you get back. Number six is blast radius. Now, this one again, Anthropic made themselves and it might just save your entire project. Because when Claude is about to run something risky like deleting a whole folder, it stops first. It shows you exactly which files would get deleted. It shows you even a proceed button and a cancel button that you have to press yourself. Now, you might not think that your agent would ever delete your files, but I’ve seen so many edge cases already where even a smart frontier model, like even Opus or Fable, would wipe out someone’s entire project.

08:45 There are some real horror stories out there and if you don’t want to become one of them, then you can try out this mod or something like it. So, with blast radius, these kinds of commands get stopped automatically and an actual human has to be in the loop to press proceed before any of the files get deleted. And with blast radius, it actually shows you which of those files would be gone the moment that you do that. Number seven is reflect. Now, this mod is a bit like reinforcement learning from human feedback, but on a more micro scale and personalized to you. Because when you give Claude a piece of feedback with trigger words like no or this

09:16 doesn’t look good or I wish we’d done it this way, what happens with this mod is that a small band would pop up above your prompt asking if you want to save that as a permanent rule in your Claude.md file or your skill file. And what you do is just click save and Claude writes that rule in for you. It’s a more granular way to choose what Claude reflects on and to make sure the things you’ve already corrected on are fixed or done better the next time that you use it. Number eight is the terminal browser. Now, this one is for people who use Claude code in the terminal because what it does is it opens a real web browser right beside your chat. So, if

09:47 Claude builds you a web page, you can look at it and review it without ever leaving the terminal. Of course, it can also open GitHub pull requests the same way. So, you save the time and the head space of jumping between Claude and a browser to check every change to your code or to your design. Everything now stays in one place. So, if that’s a feature you’ve been missing because you work mainly in the terminal, then this mod may be for you. Number nine is replay theater. Now, this last one is another of Anthropic’s own sample mods and it’s called replay theater. And what it does is after Claude finishes a turn,

10:18 a replay button actually shows up and when you press it, it steps through every file edit that Claude has made. So, you get a rundown of what it did and can understand the changes to your workspace. And again, even though this was originally created by Anthropic for code, it’s actually not limited to just that use case. If you were writing an article, for example, it can let you replay exactly what Claude changed in your draft. So, if it made major changes, you can pinpoint exactly where they are in that article. And a great thing about this is that mods are entirely modifiable to your liking. And

10:49 the way you do that is really easy. First, you just need to make sure that Claude code is up to date because mods need this version 2.1.287 or newer. In the terminal, you can just type Claude update or in the desktop app, there will be a pop-up that shows you if you’re on the latest version. Then just open Claude code, describe the modification that you want, and Claude code comes with a built-in skill for this. It’s called plugin authoring. So, Claude already knows how mods are put together. It’ll start building it and then it’ll ask if you want to turn on hot reloading for this session. What that means is it will just allow that

11:19 session to sort of reload or restart itself so that when you turn that on, your mod would show up in that session as soon as Claude finishes building it. And if you don’t like something or you want to tweak a feature, just tell it what to change the way you talk to a normal person. One thing to know is that a mod that Claude builds for you is temporary by default. So, when you find one that you like, ask Claude to save it as a plugin and install it, and it will be there every time that you open Claude code. Now, by default, mods don’t really cost anything extra, but you of course do need a paid plan because that includes Claude code. And also, any mod

11:51 that needs to call on a model in the background uses your Claude usage like everything else. So, there you go, that’s all nine of them. As usual, I hope that was useful. I think mods are a really good move by Anthropic, and I hope OpenAI follows suit because I think the era of more malleable software is definitely coming soon, and the fact that Anthropic, one of the biggest and most influential companies right now, is opening up their own application to modification is a good step towards software that can be hyper customized to our needs. I hope that gave you an idea of the mods you could build for your own workspace, and again, the PDF guide is

12:23 just down below if you need it. Send that to your Claude code to pick out the ones that are useful for your setup or to customize. As usual, thanks for watching till the end, and if it was useful, then consider tapping subscribe down below because it helps me a lot to put out more educational stuff like this. I’ll see you all next time. Cheers. >> [music]