Claude Usage Bar

Shows your Claude Code rate limit usage in the VS Code status bar — always visible while you code.

Features

• Live usage bar — S: ████████░░ 92% · 1h 12m in the status bar
• Session (5h) and weekly (7d) limits tracked separately
• Display mode — choose session, weekly, or both via settings
• Color alerts — yellow at 70%, red at 90%
• Reset countdown — updates every 30 seconds
• Zero extra API calls — passively reads Claude Code's own usage responses via Node.js diagnostics_channel
• Bootstrap on reload — one API call on activation for fresh data immediately
• Persisted state — last known usage survives VS Code restarts

Requirements

• Claude Code VS Code extension installed and signed in
• macOS (uses the macOS Keychain for bootstrap auth — Windows/Linux support coming)

How it works

Both Claude Code and this extension run in the same VS Code extension-host Node.js process. We use Node.js diagnostics_channel to passively observe all HTTP traffic. When Claude Code calls its /api/oauth/usage endpoint, we read the response body — zero extra API calls.

On activation, a single bootstrap API call fetches fresh data immediately (using OAuth credentials from the macOS Keychain). After that, all updates come passively from intercepted responses.

For terminal Claude sessions, a statusLine script can write rate limit data to ~/.claude/usage-bar-data.json, which the extension watches as a fallback.

Status Bar

Hover for a full breakdown of all limits (session, weekly, Sonnet, extra usage). Click to refresh.

Settings

Commands

Known Limitations

• macOS only (bootstrap uses security CLI for keychain access)
• Requires Claude AI login (not API key auth)
• Usage updates when Claude Code fetches usage data (on panel open/refresh), not on every message

Release Notes

0.3.4

• Persist display mode — switching display mode via command palette now saves to settings, so it survives VS Code restarts

0.3.3

• Days in weekly countdown — reset timer shows 4d 6h instead of 102h 38m
• Switch Display Mode command — cycle session/weekly/both from Cmd+Shift+P without opening settings

0.3.2

• Background poll — fetches fresh data every 5 minutes with Retry-After backoff on 429
• Click to refresh — clicking the status bar immediately fetches fresh data
• Auto-reset expired limits — usage resets to 0% when the session timer expires
• Security fixes — hardened keychain access, response handling, and backoff logic
• Handles both 0–1 and 0–100 utilization scales and ISO/epoch resets_at timestamps

0.3.1

• diagnostics_channel intercept — passively reads Claude Code's own API responses, zero extra calls
• Bootstrap fetch on activation — fresh data immediately on reload
• Format normalization — handles both 0-1 and 0-100 utilization scales, ISO and epoch timestamps
• Display mode setting — choose session, weekly, or both
• Clears stale cache when bootstrap gets rate limited

0.2.0

• Reverse-engineered from Claude Code CLI — matched official implementation
• Fixed utilization/timestamp parsing
• Removed self-managed token refresh
• Added retry with exponential backoff for 5xx errors
• Stale state fallback and persisted state across reloads

0.1.0

Initial release.