Use --verbose to Watch Every Tool Call Live
Not sure why Claude is doing what it's doing? The --verbose flag streams every tool call live so you can follow along in real time.
claude --verbose "Refactor the auth service to use dependency injection"
With verbose mode on, you'll see each file Claude reads, every command it runs, and every step it takes before making a change. This is invaluable for a few things: debugging unexpected behaviour, understanding why a task is taking longer than expected, or learning how Claude approaches a complex problem.
It also lets you catch Claude heading in the wrong direction early enough to press Escape and redirect it — rather than waiting for it to finish and then unwinding the changes.
# Great for understanding Claude's codebase exploration strategy
claude --verbose "Find why our test suite is failing intermittently"
Verbose mode is also useful when you're building automation with Claude Code — it lets you verify the tool calls match what you expect before you commit to running it unsupervised.
# Combine with --print for non-interactive verbose output
claude --verbose --print "Summarise all open TODO comments in the codebase"
When Claude surprises you, --verbose turns the black box transparent.
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When a page takes five seconds to load or an API endpoint times out under load, tell Claude which route is slow and it traces the entire code path — controller, services, queries, loops — identifying N+1 queries, redundant computations, missing indexes, and cacheable operations, then fixes each bottleneck.
Flaky tests are maddening — they pass locally, fail in CI, pass again when you retry. Tell Claude to read the test, identify the source of non-determinism — timing issues, shared state, date dependencies, or order-dependent setup — and fix the root cause so the test is reliably green or reliably red.
When your app throws an error, don't just Google the message — paste the full stack trace into Claude Code. It reads the trace, opens the referenced files in your codebase, follows the call chain, and pinpoints the actual root cause instead of just explaining the symptom.