We’re now well used to AI companies pushing out model upgrades and new features, but one of the most recent updates to Claude added something more unusual: a Reflect tool that looks back on how you’ve been using the AI bot.
Anthropic says Claude Reflect has been introduced to answer questions like, how often should someone use AI? How can it be used most effectively? When is AI suited to a task, and when is it better left to a human? And also, perhaps, are you letting AI do too much of your thinking for you?
In practice it works a little bit like Spotify Wrapped, rounding up your activity in the app over the past month, three months, six months, or year. And it turns out that its summaries are mostly fair and insightful, based on my testing.
Reflect is available now inside the Claude apps for Free, Pro, and Max users, though Anthropic is labeling it as a beta feature for now.
Getting started with Claude Reflect
Claude will summarize your recent AI chats.
Credit: Lifehacker
Before you can use Claude Reflect you need to have the Memory feature enabled: On the web, click your profile icon (bottom left), then Settings > Capabilities. In the mobile apps, tap the menu button (top left), then your profile icon, then Capabilities. If the Search and reference chats toggle switch is enabled, you’re good to go.
When you’re ready to do some reflecting, you need to be in the web or desktop apps. Click your profile icon (bottom left), then Settings, then Reflect. A summary will be automatically generated for your last month of usage, by default, but you can change the time period via the drop-down menu in the top right corner (click the circular refresh arrow icon to load a new summary).
I must admit up front that I tend to regularly delete my Claude chats as I go—I don’t like leaving a long digital trail behind me for a variety of privacy and security reasons—so I can’t tell you what it’s like to have Claude dig through months and months of conversations. It may be that digging into bigger datasets get you different results.
What I can tell you is that Claude’s review of my last month of AI use was still interesting: It correctly identified that I spend a lot of time working on little web apps and widgets that can help with my work, and of course experimenting with Claude’s capabilities (also for work purposes, most of the time).
However, it does ignore your most recent conversations, depending on the calendar: If you’re half way through July, your “past month” summary will only run up to the end of June, so only whole months are counted in the summary. It also seems to ignore shorter, one-off chats in favor of bigger trends.
What do you think so far?
Digging deeper into the data
The summary splits your AI usage up into categories.
Credit: Lifehacker
Your reflection starts with a summary and a chart showing daily activity, but if you scroll down there’s more to explore. Claude will break down your time into categories that you spend time on (like a New Tab extension for Chrome in my case), and assess your AI fluency skills too—basically, how good a prompter you are.
I scored highly in terms of “delegation” to the chatbot and “discernment” in terms of assessing the AI output, but apparently my “description” skills could use some work. Claude pointed out an occasion where I could’ve been more precise with a prompt, and gave me an example of how I could’ve refined it.
I’m not sure anything I read in Claude Reflect is going to change how I use the AI, but I think it’s worth dipping into every now and again just as a self-audit. In the same way Spotify Wrapped can reveal that you’re listening to far too much ’90s pop, Reflect can help reassess your AI boundaries—particularly for heavy users.
I did find some of the summarizing to be a bit too polished: It’s typical of AI bots like Claude to want to write a flowing narrative that can be tied off neatly, rather than a more awkward report that’s more accurate, and this is evident again here. On the whole, though, it seemed to give me fair assessments.
If you do feel your Claude use has got out of hand, the Reflect summary includes a Set quiet hours and breaks link that leads to the Time and focus section of the app settings: From here you can set screen time limits for yourself with the AI, and have it remind you to take a break from prompting every so often.
