Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why

I just used Claude to write a plug-in which changed the bottom of the CLI to say: ( ) Usage: 34% (resets in 2h 47m) Context: 56% [Opus 4.6] auto mode on (shift+tab to cycle) That way if my usage starts shooting up, it's very easy to notice (and the color of "( )", which is a circle that I couldn't paste here, changes when it gets high, ensuring I don't miss it). I coupled that with a hook that watches for usage spiking (basically when I've been talking too long or did something to add a ton of context, so suddenly every turn sends a ton of context back, using up a ton of usage). Between the two I haven't hit usage caps in weeks.

I didn't know it was still possible to develop software after your ai quota runs out.

I made an "amateur hour" error with Codex. Given Anthropic's recent reliability problems I thought I'd take a little time to try Codex with their $20/mo plan. So I downloaded it and gave it a whirl, not realizing that the default model was gpt-5.6-sol. Well after just an hour or two, I blew through my entire week's quota. Whoops! It would be cool if these harnesses could all graphically display your quota usage on the screen at all times.

Full story if anyone is interested - https://www.kelviq.com/blog/claude-code-usage-limits-where-t...

In 95% of cases it is because you had a large context for which the cache expired.