contextburn for VS Code

A status bar meter for Claude Code sessions: what share of the tokens you paid for became model output, and how much was the agent re-reading context it had already sent.

The status bar shows useful work as a percentage of cost over the last few hours. Hover for the token view; click for the full breakdown — sessions, peak context, and what filled it.

Requirements

The extension is a thin front-end for the contextburn CLI:

pip install contextburn

It reads the transcripts Claude Code already writes on your machine. Nothing leaves the machine.

Settings

Why this number

In 36 controlled runs of the same twelve tasks, 94% of paid tokens re-read context that had already been sent, and cost followed a U-curve in session length — report: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22699668.

Author: Evgenii Arsentev · MIT