A Slack thread about our climbing AI bill, plus word that per-user usage limits were landing soon, sent me to check what I was actually spending on Claude Code. The answer was that I had no idea.
The cost only showed up after the fact, in a dashboard I never opened. So I built a gauge instead. My terminal footer now reads out the session's vitals on every render, and the whole thing is one shell script.
I spent months writing posts for this blog. Each one went live on the site, got maybe three readers (one of them me checking the RSS feed), and sat there in peace.
Then I started copy-pasting the same content to dev.to manually — fixing broken image paths, stripping out MkDocs-specific markdown, re-pasting. Every. Single. Post.
The third time I did it, I wrote a Python script instead. That script became a CI pipeline. That pipeline became the subject of this post.1
I used the default macOS Terminal for years and thought that was just how terminals look.
Then I saw someone else's — proper font, syntax highlighting, a prompt that actually tells you something — and realized mine looked like a hospital monitor from the 90s.
