Spotlight by Backplanes

Session reports for Claude Code & Codex to improve your code

Developer Tools

Artificial Intelligence

Security

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What a launch day. THANK YOU, Product Hunt. 🔦

#3 Product of the Day, and honestly the part we'll remember is this comment section. You showed up with war stories, hard questions, and lines better than our own copy ("invisible until it isn't" -- still thinking about that one).

Huge thanks to @fmerian for hunting us and being everywhere in this thread all day, to @chrismessina for the support and one very relatable .env confession, and to the @Spotlight by Backplanes team -- @gogogadgetneil, @nick_vlku, Andrew, and Christina -- what you pulled off this week was incredible.

And we heard you on what to build next:

• More harnesses: Cursor, Cowork, Copilot

• Windows support

• Deeper reads on quality of work, and the "why" behind agent choices

• Catching the things agents SAY are done but aren't

• Automating the insights, so your agents get recursively better without you lifting a finger

Keep telling us what you wish you could see -- we want to build this all for you, and we read every comment you make. 🔦

the 'recursively better every session' claim is the most ambitious thing in the description and the one worth understanding concretely. what does the feedback loop actually look like. does Spotlight generate suggestions you can feed back into your agent setup, does it modify your harness configuration, or is it more of a human-readable report that you have to translate into action yourself. the difference between actionable improvement and interesting observation is usually where these tools succeed or fail

The session-report angle for Claude Code/Codex is pretty useful. I might have missed it, but do you separate “what changed” from “why the agent made that choice”? That distinction matters a lot when reviewing messy agent runs.

As an engineer who gets flak for not selecting "auto accept edits" and wanting to observe and approve most (if not all) actions Claude does, I love this idea. This kind of insight is sorely needed.

love to see this product, what's most valuable insight you learn from user's work in Claude Code?

Please just take my money.. I will love to try it out

this is smart. the gap right now with AI coding agents is that most people have no feedback loop — they ship what the agent outputs and hope for the best. having session-level visibility into what actually happened is the kind of thing that separates someone who uses AI well from someone who just uses AI. curious how granular the reports get on code quality vs just activity metrics?

Congratulations, @gogogadgetneil and team. This is much needed - way more than many realize. My experience was similar to what Neil shared on the LinkedIn post about unseen changes made or even files read outside a project being worked on.

Spotlight replaced a bespoke string of skills I would have to run by hand. Super helpful!

So cool. Will this help me track what actions Claude is actually taking on my behalf? Is there a way that I can use this report to help convince my boss that it's ok for me to use coding agents?

I can definitely see that value here. It reminds me that I constantly have this nagging fear as I'm building with agents, with that inside voice constantly thinking "what are you really doing under the hood". The great thing about humans doing the development is we're slow! That acts as a natural fishing net to catch inadvertent security disasters. But as we transition to agentic engineering, speed will overwhelm us unless we have tools like this.

As the other conversations have mentioned here... the real secret sauce here is how you "discover" these issues. Its going to be tricky across different models and platforms, as each will probably have their own screw-up signatures that will need tuning.

This hits a real blind spot with coding agents. They can move fast, but knowing what they quietly touched, broke, or exposed afterward feels just as important as the code they shipped.

Congrats on the launch and best of luck today. Looking forward to seeing how developers use Spotlight to build better feedback loops around their AI-assisted development process.

It is not built for windows right? because i am only seeing for macOS, Linux, and WSL 2.

Really like how Spotlight turns hidden agent behavior into clear reports, what’s been the most eye-opening pattern you’ve seen teams discover so far?

Been waiting for a product like this to arrive. Coding agents broke the feedback loop that used to make engineers better. You don't write the code, you don't review most of it, so where does the learning come from? Everything in the stack accelerates output; nothing closes the loop back to the human. Session reports as a feedback mechanism (not just an audit trail) is the right shape for that. The "what's worth keeping" part matters more than the scary findings, IMO.

"Recursively better every session" is exactly the missing piece I keep hand-rolling. I write a tiny end-of-session log after every Claude Code run and the gold is always the same: what I had to babysit and why. Automating that and feeding it back as a skill/memory primitive will save hours per week. Free + multi-harness is the right packaging. Following.