Claude Prompt Monitor

Know when Claude Code is done — and roughly how long it will take — without watching the terminal.

The extension tracks every prompt you send to Claude Code, shows live progress while it runs, estimates the time to completion from your own past prompts, and notifies you the moment the prompt finishes.

It works for both the Claude Code VS Code extension and Claude Code running in a terminal (inside VS Code or anywhere else on the machine), because it reads the session transcripts Claude Code writes to ~/.claude/projects/. Nothing is sent anywhere, and Claude Code itself is not modified or wrapped.

What you get

Status bar — while a prompt is running:

$(sync~spin) Claude 1:12 / ~2:30

Elapsed time, then the estimated total. A ? after the estimate means there is not enough history yet for a confident number. Hover for the prompt, the current tool call and the time left. Click to open the Sessions view.

Sessions view (activity bar) — one row per Claude session, expanded into the steps of the current turn: each tool call, its target, and how far into the turn it happened. Finished sessions keep their last turn so you can see what took the time.

Completion notification — when a prompt ends:

Claude finished in my-project — 2m 14s · 18 tool calls · 12.3k tokens out

Short prompts are ignored by default (see notifyMinDurationSeconds), so you are only interrupted for the ones you actually walked away from.

Optional progress notification — a real progress bar with the current step and the time remaining, for when you want the ETA in view without the status bar.

Notifications outside VS Code

By default the completion notification is a VS Code toast, which you only see if a VS Code window is open and in front of you. That is the wrong place for the case this extension exists for — walking away from a long prompt.

Set claudePromptMonitor.notificationTarget to native (or both) and the notification goes to the operating system instead: Windows toast, macOS notification centre, notify-send on Linux. It shows while VS Code is minimised or behind another window.

The prompt text is passed to the OS through the environment or as separate argv entries, never as part of a shell string, so nothing in a prompt can be interpreted as a command.

Desktop widget

Claude Monitor: Open Desktop Widget opens a small always-on-top window that sits above every other application and stays there until you close it — the x in its corner, or Esc. Drag it anywhere; it remembers where you put it.

ai_patro                                        x
1:23 / ~3:16   12 tools
--------------------------------
Bash - add release notes for the 1.4 build

It runs as its own process, so minimising or closing VS Code does not take it away, and it estimates with or without the extension:

• While VS Code is running it reads the extension's status file, which carries the estimate straight from the extension's own history.
• Otherwise it reads the transcripts directly. Elapsed time, tool count and the current step come from the running turn; the estimate comes from the completed turns in the same file tails, plus the history file the extension publishes if it has ever run. The quantile walk is the same one the extension uses, so the number means the same thing.

With several prompts running it shows the one you have been waiting on longest, plus a +n more count. The transcript scan runs every 3 seconds rather than on every frame — it costs about 180ms and the window would stutter otherwise — while the clock keeps ticking every half second from the cached start times.

Set claudePromptMonitor.overlayAutoStart to open it automatically whenever a prompt starts. Only one widget ever runs: opening it again brings the existing one to the front instead of starting a second, and pulls it back into view if it ended up off-screen. Windows only for now.

With VS Code closed entirely

For terminal-only use, hooks/claude-stop-toast.ps1 is a standalone Windows Stop hook. It needs no VS Code and no extension — Claude Code runs it when a prompt ends, and it reads the transcript itself for the duration and tool count. Copy it somewhere permanent, then register it in ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "hooks": {
    "Stop": [
      {
        "matcher": "",
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File \"C:\\Users\\you\\.claude\\hooks\\claude-stop-toast.ps1\""
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

It stays silent for prompts under 15 seconds, always exits 0 so it can never fail a turn, and finishes in about half a second — it reads the last few megabytes of the transcript directly rather than using Get-Content -Tail, which takes ~37 seconds on a large transcript and would block Claude Code for that whole time.

If you already have a Stop hook, add this one to the existing hooks array rather than replacing it.

How the estimate works

Every completed prompt is recorded locally: duration, number of tool calls, prompt length, and the project it ran in. When a new prompt starts, the estimate is the median duration of comparable past prompts in the same project.

While the prompt runs the estimate is re-derived from what has actually happened:

• Elapsed time rules out the quick outcomes — once you pass the median, the estimate moves up to the 75th percentile, then the 90th, then the 98th.
• The number of tool calls so far rules out the samples that finished with less work than this one.

The effect is that the bar never claims a prompt is about to finish when it isn't. Measured against ~110 real prompts from this machine's own transcripts, the up-front estimate lands within 2× of the real duration for 43% of prompts (median error 12%), and the live estimate was still ahead of the actual finish 89% of the time at the halfway mark.

On first run the extension reads the tail of your recent transcripts, so estimates are useful from the first prompt rather than after a week of use.

Settings

Shortcuts

The Sessions view title bar carries the things you reach for most: Open Desktop Widget, Timing Stats and Refresh as buttons, with Toggle Completion Notifications, Open Session Transcript and Clear Timing History under the ... menu.

Rebind either in Keyboard Shortcuts (Ctrl+K Ctrl+S), searching for "Claude Monitor".

Commands

• Claude Monitor: Show Sessions
• Claude Monitor: Open Desktop Widget — the always-on-top status window.
• Claude Monitor: Toggle Completion Notifications
• Claude Monitor: Show Timing Stats — how many prompts are recorded for this project, with the median and 90th-percentile duration.
• Claude Monitor: Clear Timing History
• Claude Monitor: Open Session Transcript — opens the raw .jsonl for a session.
• Claude Monitor: Refresh

Install

npm install
npm run compile
npm run package        # produces the .vsix
code --install-extension somshrestha-claude-prompt-monitor-0.1.0.vsix

Press F5 in this folder to run it in an Extension Development Host instead.

Limits worth knowing

• A prompt is considered finished when Claude's reply ends its turn. If you interrupt a prompt, the turn is marked abandoned at your next prompt (or after staleTurnMinutes) and is left out of the timing history — an interrupted run says nothing useful about how long the work takes.
• Progress is derived from transcript output, so a long single tool call (a big build, a slow test run) looks like one step until it returns. Elapsed time keeps moving; the step list does not.
• Estimates are per project. A new project starts with the global history until it has three prompts of its own.
• The status bar and Sessions view are VS Code surfaces. For status without VS Code in front of you, use the desktop widget, notificationTarget: native, or the Stop hook.
• The widget and the Stop hook are Windows-only. Native notifications work on all three platforms.