Every one of these fixes a specific frustration newcomers put up with silently.
/btw — ask a side question without derailing
“Ask a quick side question without interrupting the main conversation.”
You’re deep in a task and need to ask something unrelated — “what does this error mean again?” Without /btw you either derail the or open a new one and lose your context. puts this in its own startup hint strip, which tells you how often people need it.
/branch — fork the conversation and try the other way
“Create a of the current conversation at this point.”
For “what if we did it the other way instead”. You keep everything up to this point and explore a second direction, without losing the first.
/recap — where was I?
“Generate a one-line session recap now.”
You came back from lunch, or from yesterday. One line, no scrolling.
/context — where did my tokens actually go?
“Visualize current context usage as a colored grid.”
The is invisible until it hurts. This makes it a picture. Run it when Claude starts feeling forgetful and you’ll usually see why.
/doctor — clean up your setup
“Check the health of your Claude Code installation.”
Run it in a session for a full checkup that can also fix what it finds. Good after a few months of accumulating , and edits you’ve forgotten about.
/cost — what is this costing me?
“Show session cost, plan usage, and activity stats.”
The question every colleague asks in week one and is slightly embarrassed to ask out loud. Now you can just look.
Two more worth knowing exist: /insights generates a report analysing your recent sessions, and /export saves the conversation to a file or clipboard — handy when you want to show a colleague what happened without a screen-share.
When you can’t remember what’s available, /help lists everything.