# I was regenerating Claude's answers just to copy them

> There was a slash command for that.

- **Published:** 2026-04-25
- **Tags:** ai, engineering
- **Canonical:** https://nbarwicki.com/blog/19-regenerating-answers-to-copy-them/

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I've been using Claude Code daily for months. Last week I found `/copy`. I immediately felt stupid.

It's not a hidden command. It's in the docs. But I never bothered to look, because I had workarounds that _sort of_ worked and I'd stopped noticing how bad they were.

## The command

`/copy` copies the last assistant response straight to your clipboard. Pass a number and you get the Nth response back — `/copy 2` grabs the one before the most recent, and so on. If the response contains code blocks, a picker lets you grab a single block instead of the whole thing. Over SSH, hit `w` in the picker and it writes to a file instead of touching the remote clipboard.

That's it. That's the feature. Nothing clever.

What's clever is the months I spent not finding it.

## The two workarounds I'd normalized

Before `/copy`, I had two options and both were bad.

**Manual selection.** Scroll up, drag across the terminal, paste into my editor, fix the mangled indentation. Terminals are infamously bad at preserving whitespace when you select across wrapped lines. Fine for three-line snippets. Painful for anything longer than a screen.

**Ask Claude to regenerate.** Prompt it to save the answer to a markdown file. Clean output. Preserved formatting. No manual fixing. Also: an entire extra generation pass. More tokens. More seconds. I did this constantly. I didn't register it as friction anymore — it was just how I worked.

Both workarounds functioned. Neither was necessary.

## The friction you stop seeing

The cost of any single instance was nothing. Nobody's going broke regenerating a bash script. But I was doing it over and over, day after day, for months. The accumulated flow breaks stop feeling like flow breaks and start feeling like _the job_.

One slash command would have fixed it at any point. I just never asked whether it existed.

I keep finding more of these. Features that have been in the tools I use every day, that would save me real time, that I've simply never looked for. The workaround works. I'm busy. I'd rather ship than read changelogs.

**The workflow you've accepted as "just how things are" is the first place worth actually looking.**