Silicon Valley tokenmaxxing era now has its own hardware. A new open source project integrates your Claude Code usage statistics into a small desktop dashboard, allowing power AI users to keep tabs on their usage.
Of course, you can track Claude Code usage directly in the terminal using commands or other external tools And appsbut that’s not as fun as seeing a pixel-art version of the Clawd sprite dancing across a screen before displaying the token’s usage information at a glance, is it?
The “Clawdmeter,” as the device is called, is both a fun side project for power AI users and a timely indication of how deeply Anthropic’s Claude has infiltrated the developer community and the growing interest in tokenmaxxing. This new “productivity” trend sees software engineers at various tech companies maximizing the number of AI tokens consumed at work to measure the extent to which they have adopted AI.
As a Reddit user joked on seeing the project for the first time: “At this point, Anthropic should just send them to us for free. »
Another suggested adding a button to increase capacity or top up more tokens using your registered card. (Ha, that could be dangerous!)
The idea for the project comes from Reykjavik, a software developer based in Iceland. Hermann Haraldssonwho says he’s always wanted to play with in-car devices but never had the time before.
“I’m not an embedded developer or anything like that,” Haraldsson told TechCrunch in a call. But Claude was able to support him in the project in just a few days, he says. “It’s really democratized access to programming, so that everyone can now do what developers used to do. I think that’s really positive, actually.”
Most of the time he spent building the device was spent on design, making sure the font, colors, and small animations were perfect.
To create your own dashboard, you can use a small device powered by a lithium-ion battery. display like the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.16which pairs with your laptop via Bluetooth. When the device is turned on, the splash screen plays Clawd pixel-art animations which become busier and busier as your utilization rate increases. You can also press the middle button to cycle through different types of animations if you want.
“I love when I’m working and I see it going crazy – it’s like a little dopamine loop,” Haraldsson notes.
The animation stays on screen until you press the middle button, which then displays your Claude session and weekly usage data in simple graphs.
You can press this button again to access the Bluetooth screen, which displays the connection status and provides a reset function. From there, you can tap the screen to return to the original splash screen animation.
Meanwhile, two other side buttons send Space and Shift+Tab via Bluetooth for voice mode and Claude Code’s mode toggle shortcuts. The latter allows you to move between the default Normal mode, “Accept Changes” mode, Outline mode and Auto mode.
Haraldsson says the device respects your usage limits because it reads your Claude Code OAuth token to make an API call, which then extracts usage numbers directly from the response headers.
Because Clawdmeter is an open source project, anyone can create it to add their own features, animations, screensand more, based on their particular interests and needs.
Haraldsson says he’s surprised to see that more than 800 people have featured it on GitHub since its launch on May 10, and 50 of them have already started the project for their own development. He suspects the device appeals to them because it has a nostalgic feel.
“There’s a kind of nostalgia for the days when you had a hardware device for everything, like a Walkman to listen to music or an iPod,” Haraldsson explains. (Or, like a Redditor put it onthe Clawdmeter is like a “Hardware Tamagotchi for my popup.”)
“I know it doesn’t replace anything – you could have this on your computer for example – but it’s just fun,” says Haraldsson.
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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after spending more than three years at ReadWriteWeb. Before becoming a journalist, Sarah worked in IT across several industries including banking, retail and software.
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