Claude Budget Bar

Claude Budget Bar is a VS Code status bar meter for Claude Code sessions, published by HBL Creative Studios.

It shows current context tokens against a configurable policy budget (default 150,000) with WATCH → PREPARE → HANDOFF → OVER states. The policy budget is separate from the model's technical context-window limit.

Reads Claude Code's session transcripts directly from ~/.claude/projects/<slug>/*.jsonl; no hooks, no API calls, no panel needs to stay open.

Features

• Bottom status bar meter for the active Claude Code session.
• Session detection defaults to the most recently active top-level Claude Code transcript across ~/.claude/projects, with an optional workspace-only mode.
• Configurable budget and WATCH/PREPARE/HANDOFF thresholds.
• GUI settings in the detail panel; no JSON editing required.
• Token breakdown from the latest Claude usage block: input, output, cache write, cache read, and total.
• Optional model context-window capacity display, with auto-detection for recognized Claude model IDs when left at 0.
• Copy Handoff Prompt command for starting a fresh session cleanly.
• Local-only session reading from Claude Code transcript files.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.85 or newer.
• Claude Code must have created a session transcript under ~/.claude/projects/.

The extension does not call Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI, or any external API.

Settings

Click the status bar item and use Budget Settings in the detail panel to change these without editing JSON:

• claudeBudget.budget (default 150000)
• claudeBudget.contextWindow (default 0, meaning auto-detect when the sensed model is recognized)
• claudeBudget.sessionScope (default recent; use workspace to only track the current VS Code workspace)
• claudeBudget.thresholds.watch (default 100000)
• claudeBudget.thresholds.prepare (default 125000)
• claudeBudget.thresholds.handoff (default 140000)

The detail panel shows the latest recorded Claude usage breakdown from the session transcript: input, output, cache write, cache read, total context tokens, budget percentage, context-window percentage when known, model, session id, and session file path. If claudeBudget.contextWindow is 0, the extension tries to auto-detect capacity from the sensed model ID. A manually-set context-window value always overrides auto-detection.

Commands

• Claude Budget Bar: Show Details — opens a panel with the current breakdown and a "Copy Handoff Prompt" button.
• Claude Budget Bar: Prepare Handoff — copies a continuation-summary prompt to the clipboard for pasting into the current chat.
• Claude Budget Bar: Configure Budget — opens the detail panel with editable budget and threshold fields.

Privacy

Claude Budget Bar reads local Claude Code session transcript files from top-level folders under ~/.claude/projects. It does not send transcript content or usage data anywhere.

Develop

npm install
npm run build

Then press F5 (Run Extension) to launch an Extension Development Host.

Release Status

The 0.1.0 release candidate has passed build, dependency audit, Extension Development Host smoke testing, VSIX packaging, and packaged VSIX installation locally. Before publishing, verify the static model context-window table against official model documentation, save a release screenshot for the Marketplace listing, and repeat the UI smoke test from a normal VS Code window.

License

MIT