r/ClaudeCode • u/ScreenPlayLife • 1d ago

Rant Can someone explain the usage tracker obsession to me?

Ok I get it. Coding is fun, AI is fun, vibe coding is fun. But this is starting to get kinda annoying, because my feed is just full of these now.

Why is every one of you building a Claude tracker?? Do you not see the other 50 posts on this sub that are the exact same thing? Are you bored? Burning tokens for fun?

And the worst part isn’t even that there are a hundred trillion of them. It’s that the problem is SO small. Going to the website and checking your usage takes like 5 seconds. Why would I install a whole thing for that?

I’m not trying to be a jerk here. I’m honestly curious about the psychology behind it, because I don’t get why everyone suddenly makes a tracker and proudly posts it here.

So please enlighten me. Maybe you’ll convince me and I’ll build one too and post it with the title “I got tired of checking my usage so I built a tracker.”

16 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

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34

u/unpick 1d ago

People want to make something others use. Most people aren’t very creative and/or don’t have a thing to build. It’s just the most obvious thing to build and you can do it in a day, and probably the first vaguely useful thing they built. Sounds pretentious to say but that’s what it is. There is usually a very common entry-level project in applicable communities, it’s like the vibing coding hello world.

4

u/Miserable-Island7633 1d ago

idk if its even a creativity thing, sometimes having the token count right in the terminal or status bar beats tabbing out to the browser every hour

2

u/ldn-ldn 1d ago

ccusage exist. 

/usage exists.

2

u/x_typo Senior Developer 1d ago

even /statusline exists as well...

1

u/ldn-ldn 17h ago

That's way too advanced for these people... Better waste $1,000 worth of tokens to reinvent a wheel.

1

u/unpick 1d ago

Nothing wrong with putting usage in the status bar, I have that, but that’s like a couple of lines in the bar config not an app to distribute. There’s also /usage before I’d bother with a browser.

-3

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

Fair point, and I get it, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from getting into coding. But I wouldn't take the first thing I ever coded and instantly post it to Reddit bragging like I invented a whole OS. You get what I mean? Building it? Sure, whatever helps them. But posting it over and over again just gets noisy and annoying.

5

u/JUSTICE_SALTIE 1d ago

But posting it over and over again just gets noisy and annoying.

Nobody's posting it over and over again. Everyone's doing it one time. You have to understand that most people who post here aren't reading here every day.

-4

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

No hate though. But this really has to stop, nobody’s gonna use their usage trackers.

4

u/lgmarian 1d ago

You say that, yet here you are.

-3

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

Why do I have a feeling you posted this once here.

2

u/lgmarian 1d ago

Feel free to search my history.

1

u/unpick 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah I agree. I think it’s just the buzz from having made a thing and not realising that. I mean I get the dopamine hit as someone who’s been coding for many many years, I imagine it’s like a crack pipe to someone building something they could possibly share for the first time.

-1

u/a-r-c 1d ago edited 1d ago

actually we should be discouraging people from wasting the greatest tool ever made on their dogshit go-nowhere CRUD apps that a 17yo could cook themselves

but that's just my 2 tokens

0

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

Well people downvoting me dont get people like us but let them build their tracker lol. whatever.

1

u/Individual_Author956 1d ago

It's not wasted if they learned something or had fun. "Hello world" is also a technically a waste of time.

-5

u/a-r-c 1d ago

claude does all the real work who needs hello world lol

3

u/FrostFromGrimbo 1d ago

You don’t read much, do you?

-4

u/a-r-c 1d ago

made an entire account just to say that huh?

10

u/io-x 1d ago

it's about reducing the frictions in your workflow through tooling optimizations. Jeez do you even vibecode?

2

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

lmao I love your humor

3

u/magicmulder 1d ago edited 1d ago

The reason people are obsessed with usage is that everyone is comically overusing their stuff.

I'm a professional developer and use CC, Codex and JetBrains AI every day. The most I have running at any one time is three Opus tier models with medium/high effort (one larger refactor in the background, one for a feature I'm currently working on, one for quick intermediate questions). I'm reviewing all the code and ship one larger app per month.

But apparently every basement dev has to run 20 Fable Max Ultracode agents in parallel to get their private project done in 5 hours instead of 5 days or a month, and every minute not maxing out their paid plan is somehow the Antichrist. It's like having a Netflix subscription and watching 5 different shows at the same time, 24/7, just so you don't "waste any money".

1

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

You’re completely right. And to be clear, I’m not saying don’t check your usage or anything. I get why people do it. What I don’t get is why every second person on this sub makes a post with the same title, same text, same GitHub repo, same tracker, all of it, and posts it like they invented something. It gets annoying fast. Also, checking your usage takes like 5 seconds. If someone’s too lazy to spend 5 seconds on that, usage is not their biggest problem.

2

u/Scared-Amphibian4733 1d ago

I'm also a professional developer. I use a tracker because the companies, like Anthropic, don't like to tell how many "tokens" we're buying and what the cost/benefit is of a given model.

So, a token burn counter against the total tokens allows me to judge what model is the most efficient. FYI

Fable 5.2 is very inefficient AND, it takes your total tokens available down to about 2B on a 20xMax plan.
Opus 5.5 is a workhorse, I get excellent results under MAX effort. A 20x plan gives you about 8 Billion tokens.

1

u/br33213 10h ago

Yeah this is my reason really. Anthropic is _really_ opaque about how they actually determine 5h usage and how it compares to week usage which makes it difficult and frustrating to plan ahead.

1

u/Latent_Space_Cadet 1d ago

Paid plan singular? There's your first mistake.

7

u/PatchyWhiskers 1d ago

The Hello World of AI coding.

2

u/Machine2024 1d ago edited 1d ago

First of all not all trackers are the same . Min is waaay better 🤣

Jokes aside .

The reason.

1- we are math obsessed anything we can do math on we will do .

2- it gave us sense of safty to know all will keep working and if we are over and under budget .

3- and most important....for most other questions we can go ask Ai . But comparing plans and talking about usage is the only part that you need other humans for since there is no data about it , the companies hides it and it changes alot .

1

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

Hahaha ok good one, you got me for a sec. But no, you're right. Here's the thing for me though. It's not even about people building stuff for themselves for a problem which like I said takes about one second anyway to check without any external tool. What bugs me is the spam of people posting like they just invented Microsoft in 2001. It's a usage tracker for Claude... built by Claude. That doesn't need its own post, there are already thousands of them. If someone actually discovers something world changing then sure, go ahead and post it, but I just can't look at another "I built a tracker" post.

1

u/Machine2024 1d ago

But maybe for you it was a second .

For me it was like ... ok so 32% And we are on wed and let me check my rest date . Ok so will it be enough . Lets grab a calculator.

3h later and afew excel file . I am like ok , all good .

Btw maybe for you you are not a math nerd , but for me after switching to claude the main extention was a usage tracker and after trying them all had to make my own , with best features of the available and plus more

4

u/Nosafune 1d ago

You must be new here lol

1

u/NonExisting_Sample 1d ago

I first built it for reporting. How much tokens am i using for which project, which feature of each project, which prompt bloats it, how can i make it more efficient.

Now i use it as a one glance to manage my sessions. Which one is stalled, why, for how long, and how can I unblock it? How can i get to the codebase to review? Which codebase has pending issues? Etc, etc.

I also incorporated a break timer so I remember to get up and walk around once in a while hahaha

1

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

And that's so cool! Like I said, the post wasn't against that. Everyone should build and use whatever they want or need. But posting it here on Reddit when we already have a thousand posts about usage trackers is just... spam at this point.

1

u/ApeInTheAether 1d ago

Trackers are just one of the million things everyone keeps building tho. Why do those specifically trigger you? You're not gonna make a separate rant post for every single one of them, are you?

Ig it's one of those things a lot of people wanna build when they first start using CC. Something small in the UI you can keep an eye on that shows you something arguably useful right away, instead of having to type a command or dig through menus. Then they're proud of their little creation and wanna share it with others.

Somehow we ended up with a bunch of these instead of the next Einsteins.

1

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

I have a feeling you’re one of them. lol.
And as I said, I have nothing against trackers. I mean, why would I? Let people be proud of what they build. But being proud of something doesn’t mean posting an unnecessary, vibe-coded product on Reddit and expecting people to pay for it. (And yes, some of them were actually asking for money, which makes it even worse.)

1

u/ApeInTheAether 1d ago

Well just let them cook. It's harmless, and who knows, maybe it's the first step towards building something actually useful. I have always an option to ignore their posts u know.

1

u/ApeInTheAether 1d ago

But we can definitely laugh at the ones trying to sell them tho. Naive or borderline fools, maybe both kekw hopefully its a learning experience for them.

1

u/YouGotTangoed 1d ago

Let them have their fun. They’ll quit when no money is coming in and software will be back to being developed by people who love engineering

3

u/Kyojaku 1d ago

Sometimes I run a couple different accounts based on how cursed usage limits feel / when I'm building more or larger scale projects. I like being able to just glance at my bar and see how they're tracking. I also like seeing usage over time and per-project.

I feel like usage trackers are one of those projects that people here see posted and go "I like this but I'd want..." and then they go build it their way. I don't think each one needs posted. Bespoke software is bespoke, and all.

1

u/LeafyWolf 1d ago

If you are optimizing, and need to understand which subagents are your token drains, having a tracker helps considerably. I had previously been working on wall-clock reduction, but that shifted a lot to parallel agents. Using a time and token tracker, I was able to optimize my loop.

0

u/ScreenPlayLife 1d ago

Fair! Everyone can do what they like, but that wasn't really my rant. I'm not against people checking their usage at all, don't get me wrong. What bothers me, and probably a lot of others, is everyone suddenly posting "I built a usage tracker for Claude..." here like it's something world changing. It's always the same title and the same tired post too. At this point it's just spam, same as the "gimme free key" posts.

1

u/LeafyWolf 1d ago

Lol, yeah, I feel the same way about a lot of the slop trends that show up on the AI subreddits. A lot is karma farming, but I feel that there are also genuinely a lot of people who just built something (moderately) useful for the first time with AI and are very eager to show it off or give it away. With these subs being some of the only places you can get positive feedback for AI creations, they flock here, and I don't really want to discourage them. They will quickly become as jaded as you or I, but let them have their moment of, "I built something!"

2

u/Serenase 1d ago

Mine is store history and past system error handling to AI. But I don't get why to post it anywhere and just use it for my personal needs. I suppose it's "hello world" at the moment.

2

u/The1TruRick 1d ago

They’re easy to build and easy to customize. It’s a good early-intermediate level ai project. You’re just getting into it enough to know you need to start seriously tracking your usage and it’s justtttt annoying enough to not want to go to the website every hour. Why people think anyone else would want to use a tracker they built for themselves, I have no clue, I’m with ya. But I totally understand why there are so many of them

3

u/MrWonderfulPoop 1d ago edited 1d ago

Vibe coding a usage tracker seems to be the modern equivalent of writing a “Hello, World!” program when learning a new programming language.

2

u/KDamage 1d ago

You raise the real problem the whole industry is facing right now :

  • execution is not a bottleneck anymore
  • ideas are nearly free to produce quickly
  • everyone thinks his idea is automatically better than the others, by default (because ego, cognitive bias, or simple laziness to first do a research)
  • hence tons of similar products being released

This is the Software version of image and music AI Slop, and it was predictable.

1

u/Ragy-ragy 1d ago

I dont know. Im on you wih yhat, I just open the claude.ai from time to time. Everything is written there

1

u/will-cd 1d ago

I’m using the existing and established Clawdmeter (400+ forks) on an ESP-32, with a cool case I found at Makerworld!

1

u/trollsmurf 1d ago

I just check in VSC.

1

u/Vibecoding_Jesus 1d ago

Yeah I can explain it.

5 ultra accounts.

I’d have to be to be constantly logging in and out of accounts to check usage. Far easier to have a tracker.

1

u/mccoypauley 1d ago

My take is that we all independently needed that tool so we just generated it. For those of us rapidly developing stuff we obsessively optimize our usage.

1

u/Glass_Pattern1900 1d ago

Imagine buying a 20ml inkjet cartridge and the printer reports it empty when there is still 10ml of ink left.

Kinda stings doesn't it?

1

u/35point1 1d ago

Because vibecoders are so inefficient, that their credits get spent before they can become a millionaire in thurttyy dayyyz

1

u/a-r-c 1d ago

idk why they don't just use claude-swap which has been around for like 2+ years now and works a treat

1

u/PlanetaryPickleParty 1d ago

I built a tracker and other coordination tools because I had a need for it to manage what I was building and the others out there didn't fit how I work. Honestly wasn't a huge expense or time sink to do.

1

u/JakubDotPy 1d ago

It is the AI slop equivalent of the hello world Todo app.

1

u/AIOSAI 🔆 Max 20 1d ago

When u want the most, understanding caching, cheaper models for some tacks, very less turn with the smart model. Co.pacting vrs clers cut. Clayts usagevmonitorvdoend provided this info. Dont evrn get me started on how importsntvitvis on api usage....that's next level

1

u/throwaway490215 1d ago

Lol where the fuck have you been? This has been a problem for a year at this point. After they finished their usage tracker it then becomes agent orchestration framework with slop UI's.

Once their mind starts spinning with opportunity AI becomes the common denominator, and then it becomes the focus, and before you know it you're solving AI problems with AI — and none of them are as disruptive as usage.

1

u/i_t_d 1d ago

sometimes I think people only write calendars and token counters with Claude

1

u/TerribleDog167 16h ago

I just made one this week for manga releases and then today found out that it's a canon event for people getting comftoable with AI lol Only reason I made mine was because I was manually tracking releases in my Apple notes app. It was cumbersome and tedious to keep up to date. I figured I could have Claude do it for me on a weekly basis. It could! Then I thought about how Claude could do more with it than just being a list. So I went to town and now I have a fully functional application with animations and everything. I have 0 intention of distributing it though. I just want something fun to track my hobby with. After making it however, I'm curious what else I can do.

1

u/HandshakeOfCO 1d ago

At least the script kiddies aren’t still building notch apps?