Record AI Terminal Sessions and Share Them as MP4 Videos with Terminal Record

Your Claude Code session just nailed a really hard bug. Forty-five minutes of reasoning, three failed attempts, a careful root-cause investigation, and a clean fix. You want to share it — with your team, on Twitter, in a blog post, in a tutorial — and the only tools you have are screenshots and copy-paste.

Screenshots lose the streaming flow. Copy-pasted text loses the visual rhythm. Recording your screen with QuickTime gives you a 12-minute file that's impossible to share anywhere because the platforms have hard limits and your viewers won't watch twelve minutes of terminal output. The whole magic of watching an AI agent work — the word-by-word reveal, the pauses while it thinks, the back-and-forth — gets flattened.

1DevTool v1.11.3 introduces Terminal Record — one-click recording on every AI terminal, a chat-style replay viewer that captures the feel of watching an agent work, and three export formats including MP4 video sized for Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Plus Sticky Notes in Reader Mode, a new way to pin reminders, TODOs, and snippets directly onto AI terminal output. This is the share-and-document layer that claude code users have been improvising their way around for months.

Terminal Record: One Click to Capture an AI Agent Session

Every AI terminal in 1DevTool — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Amp, OpenCode, Cline, and any custom wrapper around those tools — now has a recording button right next to its fullscreen control. Click once to start. Click again to stop. That's it.

Visual Feedback You Can't Miss

Once recording is active, three things happen at the same time so you never lose track of which terminal is being captured:

• A pulsing red REC pill with a live M:SS timer replaces the recording button. The pulse is a real CSS animation, not a static dot — it's deliberately impossible to forget you're recording.
• A thin red frame stripe appears at the top of the terminal pane, framing the entire output area in red. From across the room, you can tell at a glance which of your terminals is rolling.
• The timer increments every second, so you always know exactly how long the recording has been running before you stop it.

What Actually Gets Captured

Terminal Record isn't a screen recording. It's a structured capture of the entire agent session: every prompt you typed, every chunk of output the agent streamed back, and the exact timing between them. Each user prompt gets a timestamp. Each output chunk lands in an array attached to the recording. When you stop, 1DevTool walks both arrays and rebuilds the conversation as a clean sequence of messages — your prompts on one side, the agent's responses on the other, in the original order.

This is the key design choice that makes the rest of the feature possible. Because the recording is structured data, not pixels, 1DevTool can replay it as a chat conversation, export it as Markdown, or render it into a video — all from the same source. A screen recording locks you into one shape; structured capture lets you choose the shape later.

Chat-Style Replay: Like Watching the Conversation Happen Live

The moment you stop recording, the chat-style replay viewer opens automatically. This is not a terminal scrollback dump — it's a Discord-style chat view of the session.

Prompts and Responses as Bubbles

Your prompts appear as right-aligned blue bubbles. The AI's responses appear as left-aligned gray bubbles, each with a small uppercase label above it identifying the model — CLAUDE CODE, CODEX, GEMINI, AMP, and so on. 1DevTool detects the model from the agent type when it can, and falls back to scanning the terminal name and startup command when the agent is a custom wrapper. A terminal launched as claude --my-custom-flags will still get labeled as Claude Code in the replay.

Word-by-Word Reveal With a Blinking Cursor

The replay isn't a static log. The AI responses unfold word by word, just like they did the first time. A blinking vertical cursor follows the reveal, mimicking the streaming cursor your agent uses live. There's a minimum reveal time on each assistant message — about 1.5 seconds — so short messages don't flash by, and long messages cap at a readable speed instead of dumping all at once.

The whitespace and indentation are preserved exactly. If Claude Code wrote a code block with indented Python, the replay reveals it indented and monospaced, line by line, the way you actually read it during the session. This is the part that makes the replay feel less like a transcript and more like watching the conversation happen again.

1×, 2×, 4× Playback and a Scrubber

The replay viewer has playback controls at the bottom: 1×, 2×, and 4× speeds, plus a draggable scrubber for jumping to a specific point in the conversation. The scrubber and the auto-scroll work together — as the replay plays, the messages scroll into view automatically. There's also a Reset button so you can rewind to the start without dragging the scrubber back to zero.

4× speed is the right setting for sharing a 5-minute session in 75 seconds. 1× is the right setting for showing a teammate exactly how the agent reasoned through a problem. The same recording supports both.

Three Export Formats: Markdown, Standalone HTML, and MP4

Once you have a recording, the share menu offers three completely different export paths. Each one targets a different audience.

Markdown Transcript for PRs and Blog Posts

The Markdown export builds a clean transcript: a header with the model name and project name, then the full conversation with your prompts as block quotes (> ) and the agent's responses as plain text. It copies straight to your clipboard, so you can paste it into a GitHub pull request description, a Linear ticket, or a blog post draft without thinking about formatting. This is the format you want when text is the right medium — async review, async documentation, async knowledge sharing.

Standalone HTML With Built-In Playback

The HTML export is the cleverest of the three. 1DevTool generates a single self-contained HTML file with the entire recording embedded as a JSON payload, plus the chat-style replay viewer rendered in pure CSS and JavaScript. No external dependencies, no remote assets, no servers. Save it to {projectRootPath}/.1devtool-recordings/{terminal-name}-{timestamp}.html and you can open it in any browser, anywhere — the replay just works, with the same word-by-word reveal and speed controls as the in-app viewer.

This is the format for sharing with someone who doesn't use 1DevTool. Email it. Attach it to a Slack message. Drop it in a shared drive. Anyone with a browser can hit play and watch the conversation unfold.

MP4 Video for Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts

The MP4 export is the marquee one. 1DevTool renders the chat-style replay into a real H.264 video file using hardware acceleration, with format presets sized for the platforms developers actually share on:

• Square (1:1, 1080×1080) — the default Twitter and LinkedIn embed format.
• Portrait (9:16, 1080×1920) — TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
• Standard (720p) — about 12 MB, fast to upload, fine for most platforms.
• HD (1080p) — about 22 MB, sharp on big screens.
• Speed presets: 1×, 2× (recommended for most clips), and 4×.

And here's the part that makes it actually shippable to social platforms: smart compression. Anything longer than sixty seconds gets automatically time-compressed to fit a 60-second window. Twitter's video limit, TikTok's sweet spot, the YouTube Shorts cap — all the same. Your 5-minute Claude Code session becomes a 60-second clip without you doing any editing, and without the conversation getting cut off mid-sentence. The smart-compression algorithm scales reveal speed across the timeline so the full session fits while still feeling readable.

Every exported video ends with a branded credit screen — a quick 1DevTool watermark and product link. If you're a PRO user, you can disable the watermark from the export dialog with a single toggle. Free users see the toggle disabled with a PRO badge and a short upsell, no nagging.

A Per-Project Library of Your Last 24 Recordings

Recordings don't disappear after you close the replay viewer. Each project keeps its last 24 recordings in a per-project recording library, accessible from a session recordings dialog. You can browse old captures, replay them, and re-export any of them in any of the three formats. Delete a recording by hand if you want to free the slot, or just let new recordings push out the oldest one.

The 24-recording cap is intentional — large enough to keep a week or two of meaningful sessions, small enough that the recording library doesn't silently bloat your project folder.

Sticky Notes in Reader Mode: TODOs and Snippets Pinned to AI Output

The other half of v1.11.3 is a much smaller feature with a much different purpose: Sticky Notes in terminal reader mode. If you're not familiar with reader mode, it's 1DevTool's rendered-markdown view of long-form terminal output — Claude Code conversations, Codex sessions, agent reports — formatted as if you were reading a clean markdown document instead of staring at raw ANSI.

Now you can pin sticky notes directly onto reader mode, alongside the agent output. Click the sticky-notes button in the bottom toolbar, and a movable, resizable note appears next to the document. Type into it. Drag it. Resize it. Color-code it. Repeat until your reader mode looks like a real wall of post-its.

Each note has a header you can drag from, a bottom-right corner you can resize from, and a color picker offering eight presets — blue, yellow, pink, green, orange, purple, red, and gray. The transform during drag is a subtle rotate(-1deg) scale(1.02), which gives the notes a tactile, paper-like feel as you move them. They auto-save every 500 milliseconds, so you can't lose work by accident.

Scoped to the Right Context Automatically

Notes aren't global. They're scoped by source, project, and either the specific terminal ID or the specific markdown file you pinned them to. A sticky note pinned to a Claude Code session in your auth refactor lives with that session. A note pinned to a markdown file in your design notes folder lives with that file. Switch projects, switch terminals, switch files — the right notes appear in the right context.

Storage happens through 1DevTool's notes API rather than as text files in your project, so the notes don't pollute git history or show up in code search.

Notes History: Every Note Across Every Project, Searchable

Stickies-on-output is great until you have hundreds of them spread across a dozen projects and need to find "that snippet I saved six weeks ago." v1.11.3 adds a new Notes tab to the Prompt History panel that aggregates every sticky note you've ever created, across every project, into one searchable view.

The Notes History panel includes:

• Full-text search across every note, with a 300-millisecond debounce so typing is smooth.
• Filters by project, by source (markdown file vs. terminal), and by date range.
• Pagination — 50 notes per page with prev/next, so you don't hit performance walls.
• Grouping by project and by file/terminal, with a count next to each group so you know where the activity is.
• Inline editing — edit a note in place, copy its contents to the clipboard, or delete it permanently. All without leaving the panel.

This turns sticky notes from a single-session annotation tool into a personal knowledge base. Pin a snippet today; find it three weeks from now by searching for two words you remember.

Who Benefits Most

Before vs After: Sharing an AI Coding Session

Before v1.11.3

1. Have a great Claude Code session.
2. Try to capture it. Open QuickTime. Position the window. Hit record.
3. Realize you started recording too late and missed the first prompt.
4. Rerun the session, hope for the same magic.
5. Get a 12-minute MOV file. No platform accepts it as-is.
6. Trim it in iMovie. Re-export. Cross fingers.
7. Eventually post a static screenshot instead.

After v1.11.3

1. Click the record button before you start. (Or after — it captures the rest cleanly.)
2. Run your session normally.
3. Click stop. The chat replay opens automatically.
4. Click Export → MP4 → Portrait 9:16, 1080p, 2× speed.
5. Get a polished 60-second video with a branded end card.
6. Drag it into Twitter. Done.

Full Changelog: v1.11.3

The headline features:

• Terminal Record — one-click recording on every AI terminal (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Amp, custom wrappers) with a pulsing red REC pill, frame outline, and live timer.
• Chat-style replay viewer — prompts as blue bubbles, AI responses as left-side bubbles with model name, word-by-word reveal, blinking streaming cursor, and 1×/2×/4× playback.
• Markdown / HTML / MP4 export — share recordings as a clean transcript, a self-contained HTML file with built-in playback, or a rendered MP4 video.
• MP4 video export with hardware-accelerated H.264, square (1:1) and portrait (9:16) presets, 720p/1080p, 60-second smart compression, and a branded end-credit screen.
• PRO watermark removal — PRO users can disable the 1DevTool watermark on exported MP4s; free users see a PRO badge and upsell in the export dialog.
• Per-project recording library — browse the last 24 recordings for each project in the session recordings dialog.
• Sticky Notes in Reader Mode — pin reminders, TODOs, and snippets alongside terminal output; movable, resizable, color-coded, auto-saved.
• Notes History panel — a new Notes tab in Prompt History showing every sticky note across all projects, searchable and copyable.

And the supporting improvements and fixes:

• Record button flips to active state instantly on click — no more waiting for a mouse move or keypress.
• Stale terminal state cleanup — terminal panes refresh correctly after project switches and layout changes.
• Fixed duplicate terminal instances appearing after switching projects or layouts.
• Fixed record button getting stuck in idle state after the first click.
• Fixed word spacing lost in Terminal Record playback when streaming agents wrapped lines with cursor positioning.

Try It Today

Terminal Record and Sticky Notes are available now in 1DevTool v1.11.3. Download the latest release, hit the record button on your next Claude Code or Codex CLI session, and have a shareable MP4 in less than a minute when you're done. Pin a sticky note to a long agent output and find it again next month from the Notes History panel.

AI coding sessions are some of the most interesting things developers do all week, and up until now there was no good way to capture and share them. Terminal Record fills that gap without forcing you to learn a new tool — it's already in the terminal you're already using.

Record the magic. Replay the reasoning. Share the wins.