Show HN: CodeBurn – Analyze Claude Code token usage by task
github.comBuilt this after realizing I was spending ~$1400/week on Claude Code with almost no visibility into what was actually consuming tokens.
Tools like ccusage give a cost breakdown per model and per day, but I wanted to understand usage at the task level.
CodeBurn reads the JSONL session transcripts that Claude Code stores locally (~/.claude/projects/) and classifies each turn into 13 categories based on tool usage patterns (no LLM calls involved).
One surprising result: about 56% of my spend was on conversation turns with no tool usage. Actual coding (edits/writes) was only ~21%.
The interface is an interactive terminal UI built with Ink (React for terminals), with gradient bar charts, responsive panels, and keyboard navigation. There’s also a SwiftBar menu bar integration for macOS.
Happy to hear feedback or ideas.
This is cool.
I do find the activities a little suspect - it has 1 turn of planning for me in the last 30 days. I have claude write plans first before every coding session, often using one agent session to plan and then output a plan file, and then others to execute on it. I also have several repos dedicated to 'planning' in the sense of what should I do next based on what emails/tickets/bugs etc. I have. In other words - I do all kinds of planning!
So how much did the tokens to build this cost?
> The interface is an interactive terminal UI built with Ink (React for terminals)
Just like Claude Code btw.
I'm working on a custom harness because I don't like or trust some of the ones out there, so I'm going to build one purely for myself and my own needs to see just how they work, and figure out some of what you've learned by looking at how Claude works, so I might add your project to my list of tooling to look at.
yeah Ink, it was the fastest path to something that felt native next to Claude Code itself
React is very good at what it does.
I like this a lot An interesting next iteration would be to add a functionality that evaluates a user's work for inefficiencies and suggests where they can improve cut cost. Might be outside the scope of your project, but it could be interesting.
already on that probably in an hour it will be published. will let you know once it does.
Awesome!
Very cool! I saw a similar product recently that I liked but I much prefer your approach to theirs[1]
[1] https://github.com/cordwainersmith/Claudoscope
"Built this after realizing I was spending ~$1400/week on Claude Code with almost no visibility into what was actually consuming tokens."
holy slop. the $200/month plan has NEVER hit rate limits for me and I often run 5+ tabs of concurrent agents in a large 300k LoC codebase
not $1,400 out of pocket, thats the API equivalent cost of the tokens. I am on the $200/month Max plan :D.
In my case I mostly consume every bit of the weekly subscription.
The $200/month plan throttles you when you hit limits - you just wait in a queue. API usage at $1400/week means unthrottled, parallel execution with no waiting. These are very different use cases, and for teams or heavy automation workflows the API cost can make sense if the time savings justify it.
That's not how it works
You've never actually hit the limit have you? If you have you would know it's a hard limit.
You’ve never used the API version versus the $200 plan and set the two at the exact same task, have you?
Doesn't seem to work with Cursor Agent (which may store its data in ~/.cursor).
you are right. thats cursor-agent (the CLI), not the Cursor IDE. CodeBurn only parses the IDE's state.vscdb right now. cursor agent keeps transcripts under ~/.cursor/projects/*/agent-transcripts/ which we dont read yet.
filed an issue to add it: https://github.com/AgentSeal/codeburn/issues/55
cursor support only landed yesterday, so CLI is next. thanks for catching it.
Cursor Agent itself suggests that this probably won't be easy as some of the data is missing.
Made something similar a while back: https://www.clauderank.com/ Completely open source