Claude Battery – usage at a glance. A minimalist macOS menu bar widget

Hi HN, this is nothing fancy, but a tool I built for myself as a minimalist way to track usage. Also (and probably more importantly), colleagues who are marketers, writers, designers, and other non-engineering backgrounds who are/becoming power users of Claude Cowork or Claude Code and needed to keep better watch of usage.

Once Opus 4.6 landed, I was quickly aware I needed to keep an eye on usage as I capped out session limits faster than ever. I got frustrated checking usage manually and then explored the other apps and widgets out there. They're really good, and some are great, but they're just so feature-heavy and complex with that ICP in mind I mentioned earlier.

Tokens just don't feel like anything to me.... I'd watch them tick over in the thousands and then millions. So I just ignored them as I was planning and then inverted the usage metrics that Claude provides (i.e. start at 100% and not 0%), which helped me land on a battery concept. This felt good and definitely made sense to the people I asked. Then I was focused on adding only the bare minimum features... or "Simplify, and add lightness" in the words of Colin Chapman.

Anyway, that's the story and yes, the app is largely vibe coded before folks start to go digging through commits. I quite enjoyed the process and I wouldn't have hand-coded something like this myself (the issue-pain wouldn't have met the effort-required threshold). If anyone is curious, my workflow and tools used were Claude Code, with ui-ux-pro-max for design, heavy usage of compound-engineering (plan > work > review > compound). Strongly recommend this plugin. I also used Condcutor on and off, but 80% of the work ended up just being done with CC in iTerm2. It handled the agent teams much better.

Let me know if you have any bugs or feedback.