Reading the column

Usage left

How much of your plan remains, in a strip under the rows: what it asks for, and why it is off until you turn it on.

Under the rows, when you switch on Usage left in Settings › Privacy & data, sits one line per account: how much of the five-hour session window is gone, and how long until it comes back.

That pair is the whole point of the line. It is what somebody actually acts on — whether to start another turn now, and when the room comes back — and it is the figure the panel could not previously show at all. Everything else about your usage is one hover away.

Why it is off until you ask

This is the only thing the panel sends anywhere, apart from the check for a new version and LampMaster, which you switch on separately and which speaks through Claude Code. Everything else it does, it does by reading files that are already on your Mac: the hooks Claude Code emits, the transcripts, the session files.

The strip asks api.anthropic.com roughly every two and a half minutes — the same figures /usage shows you — signed with the credential Claude Code already keeps in your keychain. The panel says so, in a dialog, before the first request leaves. Switch it off and it stops at once: no timer, no request, nothing kept.

The credential is read through the same system tool Claude Code writes it with, which is the one the keychain item trusts. macOS asks nothing, and there is no "Always Allow" to press. If you were asked in an earlier version, that was the panel reading the item on its own account, and it no longer does.

The token is borrowed, never renewed

The keychain entry holds two things: an access token that lives eight hours, and a refresh token that can mint new ones for about a month. The panel reads the first, and there is no code in it that reads the second.

That is deliberate and it is not caution for its own sake. Refresh tokens are commonly rotated when they are spent, so minting a new access token with Claude Code's refresh token could invalidate the copy Claude Code holds — and sign you out of the tool this panel exists to watch. A widget that logs you out of your editor is not a trade anybody would accept, and it would look like Claude Code's fault rather than ours.

The consequence is visible, and intended. With no Claude Code session for eight hours the borrowed token expires, nobody renews it, and the strip goes quiet with a line saying it is waiting for Claude Code to refresh its sign-in. That is precisely the stretch in which you are not using any of your plan.

One line per account

You can be signed in as different accounts in different places — an organization account on the laptop, a personal one on the build box. The two can be on different plans, of different sizes.

A single unlabelled bar in that situation would not be incomplete, it would be wrong: it would read as your remaining room while the sessions spending the other account's usage sat a few rows above it in the same column. So each account gets its own line, named, and the nodes you have configured are asked as well as this Mac.

The names are kept apart. A line is named by the part of the address before the @ when that is enough; when two accounts share it — design@example.com and design@example.net — the line keeps the domain, and the whole address when nothing shorter tells them apart. A window that has not started yet, which would read «0% —», draws no line at all; a spent weekly limit always does, because it stops the work whatever the session window says.

Each node is asked on the node: the request is made over there and only the three percentages come back over the tunnel. The credential never crosses the wire.

The Claude application counts too. When it runs Claude Code — here, or on a node over ssh — it signs it in as the application's own account and hands the credential to that process alone, in its environment: it is in neither the keychain nor the credentials file. So the panel also looks at the running Claude Code processes of your own user, and draws a line for each account it finds there, asked in the same way and borrowed in the same way. No application session running, no line: nobody is spending that account.

Two machines signed into the same account draw one line, not two. They are matched on the account's identity rather than its address, because the address can be absent and the identity is what the answer is keyed on.

When Anthropic says "too many"

The figures come from an address that everything asks — Claude Code itself, the Claude application, and the panel — and it answers 429 when it is asked too often. The panel asks each account once a round, and only until one of its credentials answers. When the answer is 429 anyway, the lines stay as they were, each with its age on the card, and the next ask waits twice as long as the last, up to twenty minutes. A reading older than half an hour is dropped rather than shown as current.

The colours, and what the line shows

Green below forty percent, yellow to seventy-five, red above — the same three hues the lamps use, because you have already learned that grammar a few rows up. What keeps the lamps first is not a second palette but volume: five points of bar against a saturated dot of thirteen.

The line normally shows the session window, because that is the limit that stops the work today and returns this afternoon. When another limit is genuinely spent — above ninety percent — that one takes the line instead, and is named: a session window resetting in forty minutes buys nothing if the week is gone.

Resting on a line

The card is the complete picture, in the same shape a project's card has: every limit, what percentage of it is gone, when each one resets, which machine the figures were read on, and how old the reading is.

That last line matters more than it looks. Claude Code keeps its own copy of these figures in a file on your disk, free to read and needing no credentials at all, and the panel deliberately does not use it. Measured on the machine this was built on: that cache said the five-hour window was at zero percent and the week at six, while the account was really at nine and fifteen. It was fifteen hours old, with nothing on its face to say so. A number nobody can tell is stale is worse than no number — so every reading here carries its age.

With the helper, the sessions say it first

With the helper installed, each session reports the windows Claude Code already knows, and the strip draws those — even with the switch off, since nothing extra is asked for. Only sessions on Claude Code's default account count: one started with a configuration of its own may be another account. The request above stays as the fallback, for the hours no session is reporting.

When it runs out, at this pace

From the last hour of readings since the reset, the panel fits a line. When the window would fill before it resets, an orange ⚠ appears by its figure, and hovering it says "At this pace it runs out ~11:40, before it resets at 13:10". The reset keeps its place at the end of the line. Under ten minutes of readings, or a line that does not climb, is no forecast.

With the helper, a row's More menu can then lower a session one model until the reset: Use Sonnet until the window resets on an Opus session, Haiku on a Sonnet one. Never the session in focus. See the row menu.