cc-changelog

cc-changelog puts the unofficial Claude Code changelog in the terminal. /whatsnew opens a pane listing the releases written up on changelogs.core-directive.com, a third-party site that reads each build and describes what changed. The same module gives the model fifteen tools for looking things up on that site and shows a toast when a release lands mid-session. The README states that an AI agent wrote the code and the text from the author’s direction.

What it does

• The pane has up to four tabs. Releases lists the 25 items in the feed, newest first, with an asterisk on those that appeared since you last opened it and a line saying how many releases behind the running build is. Picking a release shows its summary and first eight entries. Search is a field plus three filters (tier, area, release). Entry draws one entry in full, code blocks included.
• Ask me about it, under an entry, offers two prompts (explain it, show how to use it) and writes your pick into the prompt box. You send it; the pane never starts a turn.
• Fifteen tools for the model, all registered at session start. Six cover the changelog: releases, entries, entry, changelog, search, and upgrade, which flattens everything published between two versions (from the running build by default) into one answer. reference says what a flag, environment variable, settings key, slash command, tool, hook event or model id is. docs searches Anthropic’s documentation as the site captured it and docschanges lists what that documentation changed, day by day, with diffs. blog reads the site owner’s posts and prompts returns the stock tool descriptions a given build sent to the model. modsapi looks up any symbol, event or type of the mods runtime, and with changes: true says what moved between releases; mods reads the site’s hand-written guide to writing one. stories follows a feature across the releases that touched it and watch lists what happened to an entry after it was published: flags moved, notes landed, corrections. Every answer pages the same way, and a refused argument reaches the model in the site’s own words. A search the model runs also lands in the pane’s Search tab.
• A poll every 30 minutes raises a toast and a status line when a release the session has not announced appears.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later, the minimum the README states, plus an interactive terminal and network access to changelogs.core-directive.com. The author verified the pane on Claude Code 2.1.267 and 2.1.269 on Linux. The repository is its own marketplace since 0.3.0:

claude plugin marketplace add AnExiledDev/cc-changelog-plugin
claude plugin install cc-changelog@cc-changelog

To read the code while it runs, git clone https://github.com/AnExiledDev/cc-changelog-plugin.git and claude --plugin-dir ./cc-changelog-plugin load it for one session and reload it when a file changes. Upgrading later is claude plugin marketplace update cc-changelog followed by claude plugin update cc-changelog@cc-changelog. Then type /whatsnew; esc returns to the prompt.

How it works

session.start registers the command and the tools, reads the feed once and starts the timer. command.run answers /whatsnew by opening the pane. ui.render draws it for the terminal surface from the cache alone: a missing document is fetched beside the frame and the pane redraws when it arrives. Each tool.call hook fetches one JSON route of the site and returns the answer as a string, cut at 20,000 characters per document. The “releases behind” line runs claude --version once per session with a five-second timeout and is absent if that fails.

Every request goes to https://changelogs.core-directive.com with a user agent that names the plugin; the baseUrl setting in /plugin, or the CC_CHANGELOG_BASE_URL variable for one shell, points it elsewhere, and the setting wins when both are present. The site holds each caller to 120 requests a minute. Search terms, yours and the model’s, travel as query strings. Responses are cached in $.store under their URL for as long as the server’s Cache-Control allows, 15 minutes if it says nothing, and revalidated with If-None-Match after that. A failed fetch serves the stale copy. The cache keeps the 40 most recent documents in a store the README says every session on the machine shares. The store also holds view (the pane’s tab, item and last search) and seen (the releases you have opened the pane on).

Tokens: the pane and the poll cost none, because nothing they draw reaches the model. The fifteen tool descriptions sit in the model’s tool list from the first turn, as with any MCP server; an answer costs tokens only when the model calls one, and answers are windowed server-side, so a caller after one paragraph of a document pays for one paragraph.

Limitations

• Terminal only. The author has not run the desktop or mobile surfaces.
• The changelog is the site’s reading of each release, not Anthropic’s. reference measures in_current_build against the newest build the site has mined, which trails the newest release by several versions.
• The feed carries 25 releases; older ones are reachable through Search only.
• Built on a runtime still marked early access, which the author says can change shape in any release. The repository also carries the 562 KB of type declarations Claude Code 2.1.288 wrote for it, published under Anthropic’s terms rather than the plugin’s MIT license.