Tagged: Claude Code

I ran echo in Claude Code 178 times last week. Median time: 7,395 milliseconds. Not a build. Not a test suite. A command that prints a word and exits. I'd filtered down to commands that do nothing at all, no pipes, no loops, no subshells, because I wanted to know what the tool costs when it isn't doing anything. Claude Code had felt heavy for weeks. I'm on Windows 11 with Claude Code running through Git Bash, and I'd filed the sluggishness under "the model is thinking." It wasn't the model. Two local fixes later, that same echo returns in under half a second and a file read went from 909 ms to 24 ms.

I've been using Claude Code as my daily driver for a while now. One thing that kept bugging me was not knowing where I stood with my usage limits until I actually hit them. Claude Code has a status line feature that lets you run a custom script and display whatever you want at the bottom of the terminal. I built one that shows me everything I care about in a single line. Freek Van der Herten wrote a nice post about his own status line showing the repo name and context window percentage. That was my starting point, but I wanted more: rate limit tracking, reset countdowns, and a pace indicator that tells me whether I'm burning through my weekly budget too fast.