I really like this idea as I find Claude's transparency frustrating. Claude code's killer features revolve around better tools to manage context and limits vs the desktop app (compact and the % remaining until auto compact), but it's not enough.

If I can offer any advice, it's that the high use of emojis in a project readme (at least for me) looks so unprofessional and makes me worry that a project was vibe -coded in the sense that the AI was possibly not babysat to the extent I think they should. That's just me, though

I got into software in a time where you would get sent to a mental institution when spotted using emojis in a code base. Times have changed.. I use emojis regularly because they help me organize context more visually. Code has now many emojis to keep me happy.

This code was written in pure vibe-coding style — mostly for fun. I've got about 10 years of experience in IT, and even I fully agree: a 1000-line main file like this one probably deserves to be locked away in a secure facility.

But hey — if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

The readme is the typical AI verbal diarrhoea of so many words saying so little it hurts. You should ask it to be a bit more concise.

As a separate comment, would it not be better to ask for your plan on first run and setup a config file to remember it? With a note how to change it. Rather than rely on cmd line variables?

Also, shouldn't it be able to pick up the timezone from the local computer? Why would it "default" to a fixed timezone of poland?

Always depends on the cost of failure I suppose.

It strikes me as very much a current aesthetic in younger companies or smaller startups, maybe highly influenced by Notion. No one makes a list or page or calendar invite in my current company without choosing an emoji for it.

It was cool until 2022. Then LLMs started injecting these emoji everywhere and it became the chief marker for code/doc smell.

It never caught on but I always liked setting the jumbo header images on Notion docs to creepy, unsettling pictures from Unsplash.

Need to write a document about converting a Rust project to Typescript? A picture of an abandoned warehouse full of expressionless baby doll heads fits perfectly.

> looks so unprofessional and makes me worry that a project was vibe -coded in the sense that the AI was possibly not babysat to the extent I think they should. That's just me, though

The irony of comments like this on software designed entirely for ai coding...

Looks so unprofessional, lol, says the guy wanting to use a free app, this isn't a microsoft made app lol it's a guy making a github app for free the audacity people have these days to shit on peoples project for 0 reason

AI coding where the human stays in control and reads and confirms code is totally different from vibe coding where you don't read code and just prompt until it sort of works.

I completely agree. Andrej's definition was pretty explicit and in my experience it is two separate worlds of AI use.

if you actually look at the code, it's a single 400 line python file that just wraps https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage, so it's possible

Yeah I noticed that too, it’s a bit crazy to me that stuff like this is getting upvotes and traction. It feels like it was vibe-coded in one-shot style without perhaps even reading any bit of the code. A bunch of hardcoded values, a `sleep(3)`, bunch of other antipatterns.

Up until recently I tended to “trust” github repos a bit more, now I feel like I need to have my guard up so I don’t fall into a trap of using something like this. Funnily enough a good first metric for me now is # of emojis in the readme - the more emojis the more likely you should stay away from it

This code was written in pure vibe-coding style — mostly for fun. I've got about 10 years of experience in IT, and even I fully agree: a 1000-line main file like this one probably deserves to be locked away in a secure facility. But hey — if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

My goto for AI generated PR descriptions and README is this addition to the prompt: tight, no purple prose, no emojis.

That turns thrse meandering emoji fests into suitable documentation. YMMV

For a reference point, it says my max session limit in the past was ~337,492 tokens and I have the Max20 plan and 99% use Opus.

My total tokens used since I started using Claude Code on May 27th was 1,374,439,311 worth around $3397.34.

I'm around ~2100 dollars equivalent on Max20 plan.

Do they have huge margins on API or are they just losing money? I use it everyday but I don't feel like I'm abusing it or anything

I've been wondering this too. They said on a podcast that the average usage is around $6 a day in credits but I really question that. If that's the case though and they do have a lot of Pro and higher tier subscribers that might be making up the difference.

Interesting, do you recall which podcast this was on?

Latent Space.

"Claude Code is also the most direct way to consume Sonnet for coding, rather than going through all the hidden prompting and optimization than the other products do. You will feel that right away, as the average spend per user is $6/day on Claude Code compared to $20/mo for Cursor, for example. Apparently, there are some engineers inside of Anthropic that have spent >$1,000 in one day!"

Link: [https://www.latent.space/p/claude-code](https://www.latent.space/p/claude-code)

yes the latent space podcast I believe

Huge margins on API lol, there's a reason the guys from deepseek told everyone that its bullshit that the big boys aren't making money, research is expensive but the inference isn't especially with the comments that even Sam Altman mentioned regarding pricing per response for the chat clients.

Exactly, was just calculating pricing yesterday, it doesn't make sense what they are doing. Straight up bs.

1. Don’t you hit rate limits on Opus? Don’t you find it slow compared to sonnet?

I have not ever actually hit the rate limit as far as I'm aware. I have gotten the "approaching Opus usage limit" a couple times but have not hit it.

This is great. I built a UI tool to run simultaneous Claude Code sessions (https://github.com/stravu/crystal) but by working on multiple features at once I hit the limits of my max account. Usually close to the reset, but it would be nice to know when it is time to take a break.

This is excellent. I am an EXTENSIVE Claude Code user but I've been a bit scared to write my own tooling around worktrees + multiple sessions because I don't understand git well enough.

To be honest, I'm a little scared to use this also. I feel like ideally each worktree would also run in a container, but that seems quite a bit harder to make work as smoothly as this does.

Please write for me on github or create issue https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor... and we can try integrate your tool with usage monitor

This is great but Crystal is already the name of a language I've messed with...

Kudos! I was just thinking about having. Laude write something like this for me. Not just within a project but the 5 different ones I have open at the same time. Too much of a good thing etc.

Very neat! Is the limit on Pro really only 7k tokens? So less than 7k words? I feel like I get more out of that. It feels like that would blow up pretty quickly with an ongoing chat, but I never hit that.

Or is this a Claude Code specific limit? I haven't used Claude Code extensively yet.

pro is the $20/mo plan that they recently started allowing access to claude code.. but i’ve heard users hit the rate limit with a few queries.. so imo that sounds about right. the chat interface has its own limits separate from claude code.

Has to be wrong. I'm on that subscription as I wanted to reinforce my opinion that it's still shit for devs that actually have experience, like it was a few months ago.

While my plan didn't pan out, cuz it was way too effective, I can confidently say that I'm going through 3-6k tokens per prompt on average, and usually get around 3 hours of usage before I'm hitting the rate limit.

The limit is probably closer to 300k then <10k

Also the chat interface doesn't have a separate limit, once you hit it via Claude code, you cannot use the website either anymore.

Maybe it's a 7k limit per prompt? Dunno if I exceeded that before

I found I can hit the limit very quickly if I have it scan large quantities of code for analysis. If I try to be more surgical, and give it terse but accurate documentation and instructions, the budget lasts longer.

Same here. Sometimes I direct it just to specific files related to the feature requested.

Claude Code is chugging away on a step (6/10) for me right now:

Transforming… (212s · 26.1k tokens · esc to interrupt)

I reset just under 2 hours ago, probably been going at this pace for the last hour or so.

7k is literally nothing, even for a trial 7k of token is basically 1-2 files written that doesn't seem right if it is then i dont see why anyone would pay for that and not the 250 prompts/month from augment or one of the others

I hadn't even heard of augment, but Claude Code's UX is _mostly_ very nice (despite the problematic UX this particular project attempts to solve). So perhaps Claude Code has a better UI/UX?

I tried it with Roo Code (with 3.7 Sonnet, not Code). For agentic use you will probably hit the limit from your first prompt/assignment if it does some browser tool use.

I'm noticing that Token usage doesn't reset after the time window unless you hit 100%.

This seems like a problem if for example, you hit 90% usage, pass the window, then burn through the remaining 10% quickly and have to wait a long time.

Uhm, does this do anything else useful besides shelling out to https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage ? Idk, this kind of stuff feels a bit disappointing, also feels like it’s perhaps one-shotted with some AI tool, and in this show hn you don’t even mention that all the actual work is done by some other tool.

Incredible, thank you for making this!

Can this be installed with uv? https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

Edit:

  # Install uv
  curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

  # Install the required CLI tool (Node.js)
  npm install -g ccusage

  # Clone and setup
  git clone https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor.git
  cd Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor

  # Install Python deps with uv
  uv add pytz
  chmod +x ccusage_monitor.py

  # Run it
  uv run python ccusage_monitor.py --plan max20 --timezone America/New_York

If the repo was structured as a package e.g. with project.toml and such there would be an even faster one-liner with pipx (https://pipx.pypa.io/latest/):

> pipx install git+https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor

> ccusage_monitor

I think there is a similar command for uv; uvx? Although, I am not sure if uvx has the same functionality / purpose as pipx.

This is appreciated but FWIW basically anything that can be installed with pip is also trivial (easier, even) to install with uv.

I can just sense how far it's from reaching my limit, and my sense is quite accurate. I can also sense when a conversation is about to reach its own maximum length, so I use the last resource to generate a summary so that I can start a new conversation and resume progress. Ironically, these AI tools have become part of my biological clock. Besides Claude, every Wednesday is like a new kind of Sunday for me, because my ChatGPT's weekly limit is reset on Wednesdays.

Today, I will commit a new Auto Mode (with DuckDB) that uses machine learning to understand your actual token limits, not hardcoded solution.

I'm working on a wrapper for these terminal agent coders that reads directly from them... you might want to consider that approach? I hope to have it here on ShowHN as soon as its better tested but email me if you want in on the private beta :)

actually reading more about how you ingest ~/.claude/projects//.jsonl the wrapper method is probably over kill..

how about making it a tool that claude can use directly?

nice ship! I wrote a blog post on how to observe trends over time for a team via OTel, but I prefer your method for individual development!

https://ma.rtin.so/posts/monitoring-claude-code-with-datadog...

I like this solution, I had tinkered with the Otel hoping to get un-redacted prompt and responses but had no luck. Did you perhaps get deeper into what data was useful?

You can get the un-redacted prompts via the OTel event logger[0], but unfortunately it won't give you responses. You could open up a GitHub issue to request that addition!

Disclaimer - I work at Anthropic but not on Claude Code, the team is responsive via GH issues though!

[0] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/monitoring-us...

You may be interested in https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

Hi! I'm the author of ccusage! I'm happy to see how people use our OSS! Happy vibe coding!

Interestingly, not a single comment on ccusage's Show HN:, but this thread here is getting crazy! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44129432

Had a very weird experience with Claude Code yesterday. Tried to convert a simple phtml table page with very old php into a new div layout. It didn't work and burned through 4 dollars. Perhaps a WSL issue but I hope that doesn't happen more.

Claude Code has something of a steep learning curve. Sessions should involve a fairly lengthy back and forth discussing requirements and encouraging the model to ask clarifying questions.

Even then, this can happen from time to time. It's important to remember that you're using an extremely expensive tool which, despite what YouTubers and bloggers say, isn't magic.

How it does it monitor usage?

Check directory ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl ;) hah very interesting topic. I have a plan to write blog post about it (all conversations history with metadata inside json lines files) What do you think about this idea? Interesting?

Wow, I had no idea Claude Code had this kind of verbose logging turned on by default. Looking around I also found a cool tool for converting these logs to HTML format for easy viewing: https://github.com/daaain/claude-code-log

Haha, in that case it sounds like an article I could actually handle. By the way, is it better to go with an article or short-form video?

Film video, transcribe, edit to become article?

I'm of an age where I rarely watch short-form videos so would read the article but you'll miss an audience if that's all you produce.

Okay, sounds good — if I manage to do it, I’ll send you a message

It's definitely interesting. Probably, one could also see how much of the context is unnecessary to optimise usage. I wonder if one could also detect whether cache was used.

Yes, cache write and read is available to fetch i can add new flag to view this values, please create issue in repository with this idea https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor...

Is there anyway to ensure these logs are output in a current project folder? Would like to store a copy in git for reference

Yes in next relesase with duckdb, We will have the possibility of a simple export

I keep the credits page open and refresh it from time to time, because I honestly only care about money, not about tokens whatever these are.

This tool is for plans with a fixed cost — like Pro Max x5 or x10 — not for API usage.

Thank you! For me, I wish it was just a simple command that outputs how much I have used out of my plan already. Also I feel it’s a bummer that I need python when CC is a node.js tool.

I will update it in next release :D And you will be able to install the package directly.

For cursor users, a similar extension to monitor usage:

https://github.com/Dwtexe/cursor-stats

Keep an eye on your memory usage after installing this extension.

I did a bisect and found this one to be consuming ~1.5gb memory alone and that's when I removed it. YMMV.

Probably for API cost. It is for fixed price plans usage

This is pretty cool.. I like the idea, could I make a semi-snarky feature request and could we add the estimated power consumed to produce results for each session ?

Soon we will have low carbon developers

Let's start with npm and node_modules first - I think it is responsible for at least half of the global warming.

We all were low carbon developers once

Maybe the few that were WFH prior to AI. I just calculated my carbon output for commuting and going to lunch daily versus WFH and using AI and it's wayyy less. Let's all save earth, stay home and use AI.

Or just straight to CO2. Google said 1000 tokens emits 8.3g CO2.

How many tokens used in a heavy vibe coding day?

Average US daily per capita is like 40kg CO2

I don’t understand the concern of this. Let’s say it says you’ve used 1.521kg of CO2 today. How is that actionable?

A single flight from JFK to LAX produces around 20,000kg of CO2. Using the 8.3g value means a flight is equivalent to 2.41 billion tokens.

I really dislike when people don't see this. They try to cut 10 grams of CO2 per day while other industries (shipping, aviation, rails) produce hundreds of tons per day and even this transportation modes are less that 20% with most CO2 produced mainly being in energy production and used by industry.

I think it’s because this line of rationality, leads to people to realize how ridiculous some of the conservation efforts are.

Plastic bags, paper straws (wrapped in plastic), most realities of recycling, vehicle selections, etc.

Leads to a lot of unpopular things.

Plastic bags and papers straws is not about CO2 emissions and I wish people would stop repeating this like it's some "gotcha", it's about landfill and natural area pollution and damage to wildlife and natural areas, and that's how it's always been talked about by policy people who have advocated on this stuff.

Have you walked a beach in the last decade?

This makes sense and I'm with you, people that are polluting beaches and natural areas should face harder punishments. That being said I'm missing plastic straws for drinking cold coffee.

Nothing stopping you from carrying your own reusable straw around with you.

Finally, most of the (local, not even thinking about the developing world) pollution is not deliberate. It blows in from other places, usually. I live rural and I'm continually picking up plastic garbage from my ditch or back forest or fields that blows in from the nearby highway and roads, especially after garbage pickup day.

Production needs to be severely curtailed.

Rituals define a school of thought (or a religion). These are rituals of folks who want to prevent catastrophe through conservation. To each their own.

Ultimately, individual habits do add up. But with climate, one would be hard pressed to find evidence that conservation is the path forward. It does not work, unfortunately.

Sure, but that's all accounted for in per capita numbers.

It doesn't necessarily need to be actionable for now but at the moment there is an exponential growth in the datacenter power usages.

For now, sure it might be ridiculously minor, but when it starts to ramp up who's to say it wont be just a ridiculous amount of energy ? Maybe not even measure the CO2, but I would love to graph the increase of energy spent over time.

Per capita that is what, 500kg?

So on that day you are 10x'ing the US person day

if you take the long view, flying is irrational too

If you have some time, feel free to open a pull request — even just with a description or clarification of what's going on! It all sounds super interesting, but I’m still trying to fully grasp the business logic behind it Once I get the idea, I’ll be happy to jump in and implement it.

Repo is here if you're curious: https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor...

Claude, "Find the hacker news discussion about github repo github.com/maciek-roboblog and implement the suggestion by bilekas. Patch format."

It produced a patch. Unfortunately it was for removing the emojis from the readme.

I just hit my usage limit this morning, and the article shows how to get these numbers so I can answer this myself -- I'd be curious to see what other people are doing token wise day-to-day

ccusage says I had 1k input tokens, 12k output and 1.2m cache create.

I'm not sure if that is 18.3g, 138.3g or 1213 * 8.3g.

At the highest number that's 10kg or 25% of average US daily per capita emission or 1 gallon of gas.

By any chance do you remember the source for that? Googling "1000 tokens emits 8.3g CO2" only gets me this thread.

The search was "ai tokens per tonne co2" and the "1000 tokens emits 8.3g CO2" bit was my paraphrasing from the AI overview.

This article [0] mentions "8.3g CO2" but it's linked source [1] uses a different number - 4.32g. Perhaps revised after publication.

I ran the search again and got different numbers... I'm sure the real numbers will be changing quite a bit over time too.

[0] https://ditchcarbon.com/blog/llm-carbon-emissions

[1] https://smartly.ai/blog/the-carbon-footprint-of-chatgpt-how-...

Oh, I thought you meant "Google, the company, published this number" (which I would have been very interested to read), not "Google, the search engine/sketchy llm, returned this result".

Fair enough.

Greta would be proud, but I’m not sure how the number of tokens relates to energy consumption.

Soon the AI companies will have different tiers of plan based on carbon output.

For $200 per month they’ll only use carbon-free power sources for your prompts. At $100 they’ll use nuclear, then $20 per month for coal, and then there will be a free tier where your prompts are powered by throwing baby seals into a furnace.

This may be pedantic, but I'm guessing baby seals are a renewable resource.

It would be on the same level as saying burning wood for power plants would be considered renewable. Is it "Green" now.. Two different things.

<3

Something like this would be great for Cursor, I never know how many credits I’m up to for the month or how much my Max calls are costing.

> Something like this would be great for Cursor, I never know how many credits I’m up to for the month or how much my Max calls are costing.

I think that's by design

interesting, so I should say hello to claude after waking up for an early reset 5h later....

Tool also says I used 198% of my max5 plan %).

I guess it expect opus usage and I was usin sonnet (after the first 20%, the auto thing)

Is there something similar to this but for Gemini?

I can implement tool like this for Gemini, please create issue https://github.com/Maciek-roboblog/Claude-Code-Usage-Monitor... with this idea

thx

you are a saint.

<3

Claude is cool, they focus on cool and useful things.

But man do I just want a way to quickly glance at my API credits and to just occasionally chat with a model from those credits without librechat of openwebui. Or set some limits, or see some usage metrics.

And please please use "forever auth" with passkeys or something, what is up with that auth email that just takes ages for a quick glance?! It always takes me 3 attempts to find what address I used at sign-up...

Oh and make it clearer why you have that API/credits system and a subscription, why is it so difficult to understand when you start using Claude that it's 2 different unrelated worlds?? First time I started my subscription I just couldn't figure out where the API section was, until I realized it just wasn't there.

I feel like I'm "holding it wrong", but please make it easier to hold it right then.

>And please please use "forever auth" with passkeys or something, what is up with that auth email that just takes ages for a quick glance?! It always takes me 3 attempts to find what address I used at sign-up...

As a person with the simple but brilliant technology of a freaking password manager, I LOATHE email to login/no-password websites. They are dreadful, we've somehow managed to come up with something worse in UX rather than move forward.

If you're working on a product that does this, or wants to do this, please please PLEASE reconsider, it's such a PITA for technical users and normies alike.

I used to think the same thing, and I still want a login/password alternative for me. But after seeing normies use online accounts and the trouble they have with password managers, I realized one of my friends had the most secure process: she would create extremely high-entropy passwords everywhere, but not remember them. Once she's logged out of her sessions after a couple of months, she uses the password forgotten link to generate another password, and so on. So her passwords are never stored anywhere, she's immune to many login stealing phishing attempts through genuine-looking fake websites as she can't enter the password, she doesn't have to deal with syncing the passwords between all her devices, and she doesn't have passwords on a post-it on her workstation. And she also doesn't get those annoying emails saying "your password is 6-months old, please change it or else!".

The email auth flow is a simplified and more efficient way to achieve the same outcome.

yeah, I find it annoying, but it's a simple way of making something secure, piggyback on something that already made a decent effort at trying to being secure enough.

Another reason to ditch email-to-login: It decreases active user count because login is such a chore. I only use those websites if I absolutely have to and there are no alternatives.

Yeah, it's the reason I eventually tuned out of Slack too (obviously I don't use it day to day). I used it for some things, some community stuff, every now and then.

So when I open it up on a new machine or after months, you have to go through that magic link bs multiple times! For all your accounts/channels! I did that 2 or 3 times and then I just stopped using it.

I don't even remember what I signed up for over the years, I know some of it was nice (like an LoRa IOT channel, an "AWS professionals" channel, I set something up for the LoRaWan network in the previous city I lived in... All just tuned out because of the login bs.

I don’t get why Slack can’t figure out how to help me migrate all my workspaces on a device I still have and am logged into in a new one in fewer than 3 steps per workspace. Sure, if I’ve lost all devices with the workspaces connected, maybe it needs to be that much PITA, but it’s a pretty common case to add/switch to a new machine or device and that process is obnoxiously poorly executed right now.

I can write a blog post about this, plus in the next release, DuckDB will be implemented along with a slightly more advanced max tokens algorithm.

Anyone else have a bunch of fun with Claude Code's Github integration... until you realized it spends from your API wallet balance?

Oops, when I saw the /install-github-app command, I assumed that since I'm on a max plan and Claude Code in my terminal is free, then the Github integration would be free.

So I hooked it up to my repo and tagged @claude in everything. It was a lot of fun tagging it in backburner issues and seeing it solve issues I couldn't be bothered to do for years. Or just seeing what it would come up with on really low effort poorly explained issues.

But not worth spending 50+ cents every time.

On one hand, it violated the principle of least surprise.

On another hand, you solved several years-old issues for under $50…which seems like a big win.

You can use your max plan ( https://github.com/grll/claude-code-action )

Currently in gray area but allowed as per anthropic comment on it - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action/issues/4#is...

Oh, thanks! You didn't go digging that up just for me, did you?

I'll try it out right now.

I had it in my Karakeep bookmarks of things to try in the coming weeks.

> Anyone else have a bunch of fun with Claude Code's Github integration... until you realized it spends from your API wallet balance?

Isn't Claude and Anthropic API two separate platforms? How does it spend from your other account?

No.

https://console.anthropic.com/settings/billing

What's that link supposed to show? It shows my anthropic account and billing. My claude account and billing (with different payment details) is at https://claude.ai/settings/billing

I see what you mean. Anthropic's UI and system organization are always very confusing.

Your link and my link are just two views into the same underlying account (unless you registered separate accounts of course). At your link, you can manage your Claude subscription. At my link, you can manage API keys and API credits.

But they aren't siloed like you (or I) think.

I got Claude Code when it launched and it always charged API credits until it was included in the $100 max subscription (and then in the cheap base subscription). It moves fast and it's not well communicated.

Addressing those issues wasn't worth $0.50 apiece? That almost certainly translates into less than a _minute_ of fully loaded engineering cost from a human.

A lot of it was from the default behavior of Claude re-reviewing a PR on every commit.

It also just psychologically just saps the fun out of something when there's a fee attached per invocation. And the UX is that I buy $50 of API credits, time passes, and then it breaks because I have to refill it again.

If it were literally a "fix issue for 50 cents" button that charges you 50 cents and that's that, then it would be different. But instead your API credits drain and you can't evaluate if it was worth it.

With uv, is there a way to install Python and Node tools like this in a self-contained way so they appear to the system as a single executable?

I guess I don't want to duplicate Python/Node for every tool, but I also don't want it to be fragile. And this wants a Node CLI tool installed globally, which I've found breaks easily with changing versions.

Good point, yes i can do it. If you can please add issue in github and i will implement it :D

it is on my todo list

> I don't want to duplicate Python/Node for every tool

`uv tool install` doesn’t duplicate Python for every tool.

I read doge instead of dodge. I need to get off Reddit immediately