- Claude Code can analyze HAR files — browser network traffic exports — to debug real-world problems quickly.
- TurboTax was detecting my browser timezone and inferring I was in Canada, redirecting me to the Canadian login page.
- One prompt was enough to identify the root cause and get actionable steps to fix it.
Claude Code as a daily tool
Claude Code can be a powerful companion for everyday tasks, especially ones that involve large amounts of data to analyze. I use it every day as part of my job, and I have been finding more ways to bring it into my daily life beyond work.
The example in this post is a nerdy one: I asked Claude Code why TurboTax thought I was in Canada and asked if I wanted to switch from the default US page to the Canadian one. That is particularly annoying during tax season. So I decided to apply one of my debugging techniques from work to my personal life.
Capturing network traffic with a HAR file
Any modern browser lets you download all the request information it used to communicate with a website. In Chrome, open Developer Tools, go to the Network tab, and you can save all the network traffic for a specific page load. All transactions are saved in the HAR format (HTTP Archive). Here is what TurboTax was showing me:
It is possible to open HAR files using many free HAR readers available on the internet and try to understand what is happening manually. That is laborious work, especially if you have no idea what you are looking for. But with Claude Code, the answer can be just one prompt away.
Asking Claude Code
Once I downloaded the file, I started Claude Code with the following prompt:
The file `myturbotax.intuit.com.har` contains the page load for the TurboTax login page.
Why does it think I'm in Canada and not in the US?
I could have also provided a screenshot of the page, but I did not find that necessary in this case.
Claude Code used Python to read and analyze the contents of the file, filtering for the relevant information. It identified that the browser was using JavaScript to inspect my browser timezone and infer my location based on it. Since my timezone matched a Canadian one, TurboTax was redirecting me to the Canadian page.
Even better, it went beyond the root cause and gave me the steps to change my browser timezone to the equivalent US timezone.
This technique — dropping a raw data file into Claude Code and asking a plain question — is not limited to TurboTax. Any time you have an opaque system behaving unexpectedly, capturing its network traffic and letting Claude Code sift through it is a surprisingly effective first step.