ClaudeStatsBar

ClaudeStatsBar: your session is 486k deep and nothing told you what that costs

A Claude Code status line for the number that actually bites. Not how full the
context window is - Claude Code will tell you that in one command - but what the
next turn costs before you type a word, and when it is worth clearing rather
than finding the limit mid-task.

Pure Python stdlib. No dependencies, no network, no transcript parsing, no proxy.
~25ms per render.

Why this exists

Building anything large with Claude means long sessions, and the session grows
underneath you whilst you work. By default nothing warns you what that is
costing, so the first sign is usually the limit itself - context exhausted, or
the rolling usage window gone, mid-task. The stronger the model the sooner that bites; Fable on a
big codebase will find the ceiling well before you expect it to.

This puts the size on screen whilst you work: how much context the session is
carrying, what the next turn costs before you type a word, and how much of the
5h and 7d windows is left. Enough to clear at a sensible boundary instead of
discovering the limit halfway through a refactor.

Sessions get far bigger than they feel. I measured two weeks of my own Claude
Code usage - 916 transcripts, 711 sessions, 57,451 API requests, 11.6 billion
tokens - and the sizes were not what I expected.

Everything I typed across 711 sessions was 1.3M tokens. The same sample re-read
11.1 billion tokens of context it was already carrying. Shorter prompts are
not the lever; session size is.

The reason is that the API is stateless. Every turn re-sends the entire
conversation - system prompt, instructions, and all prior turns - so what goes
on the wire grows with every message, whether you typed a paragraph or "yes".

Why it…