A desktop GUI for testing and exploring Anthropic's Claude API. Built with PyQt6, designed for full visibility of every message type, content block, parameter, and cost.

Built entirely using Claude Code as a personal project to explore both the Claude API and the experience of building software collaboratively with AI.

Note: This is an independent personal project. I have no affiliation with Anthropic, I'm just a private customer who wanted a better way to explore their API.

• All Claude models — auto-refreshed model list with manual fallback
• Streaming and classic modes — watch responses arrive in real time or wait for the full result
• Extended thinking — enable thinking with configurable budget; view reasoning in a dedicated tab
• Web search — built-in web search tool support with citation rendering
• Full parameter control — temperature, top-p, top-k, max tokens, timeout
• 6 output tabs:
  • Conversation (with optional markdown rendering)
  • Thinking (extended reasoning log)
  • Request JSON (syntax-highlighted)
  • Response JSON (syntax-highlighted)
  • Usage & Cost (persistent log across sessions)
  • Raw Blocks (every content block type verbatim)
• Conversation management — multi-turn and single-turn modes, import/export to JSON
• Cost tracking — per-request and cumulative session costs, saved to usage_log.txt across sessions
• Markdown toggle — render **bold**, *italic*, `code`, headers, lists in the conversation view

You'll need an Anthropic API key. If you don't have one:

1. Sign up at console.anthropic.com
2. Go to API Keys and create a new key
3. Set it as an environment variable (see below)

1. Go to the Releases page
2. Download anthropic-explorer from the latest release
3. Make it executable and run:

chmod +x anthropic-explorer
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-key-here"
./anthropic-explorer

To install it system-wide so you can run it from anywhere:

sudo cp anthropic-explorer /usr/local/bin/

pip install anthropic PyQt6
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-key-here"
python anthropic-explorer.py

To avoid setting the key every time, add this to your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc):

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Then restart your terminal or run source ~/.bashrc.

This entire application was built through conversation with Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI coding tool). Starting from a blank file, every feature — the UI layout, API integration, streaming worker threads, theme system, cost tracking, markdown rendering, and bug fixes — was developed iteratively through natural language prompts.

The project served two purposes:

1. Exploring the Claude API — understanding every parameter, content block type, and edge case by building a tool that exposes them all
2. Exploring Claude Code — learning what it's like to build a real application collaboratively with AI

anthropic-explorer.py    # Single-file application (~2500 lines)
anthropic_pricing.json   # Optional: custom model pricing overrides
usage_log.txt            # Auto-generated: persistent usage/cost history

Create anthropic_pricing.json alongside the script to override default per-model pricing:

More projects: https://makies.au