UsageBar is a minimal macOS menu bar app written in Swift that tracks your usage of two of the most popular AI coding assistants on the market right now: Codex and Claude Code. Instead of digging into billing dashboards or terminal logs to figure out how much of your quota you've burned through, you get a small, glanceable indicator that lives quietly at the top of your screen.
Why is this interesting? A few reasons:
- It scratches a very current itch. Both Codex and Claude Code have usage limits (rate limits, weekly caps, or subscription tiers) that are surprisingly easy to hit during a heavy pairing session. Finding out mid-refactor that you've been throttled is genuinely disruptive.
- Native Swift, not Electron. A menu bar utility should be tiny, fast, and battery-friendly. A native Swift implementation respects that — no Chromium tax for what should be a few kilobytes of RAM.
- Multi-assistant awareness. Plenty of dashboards track one vendor. Something that unifies Codex + Claude Code in one indicator reflects how developers actually work today: bouncing between tools depending on the task.
- Small surface area = easy to audit. A single-purpose menu bar app is the kind of thing you can read end-to-end in an afternoon, which matters when you're granting it access to API tokens or session data.
Who benefits? Any Mac-based developer who leans heavily on Codex or Claude Code — especially freelancers and consultants watching costs, or engineers on plans with hard weekly quotas who want a passive early-warning signal before they're locked out. It's also a nice starting point for anyone learning SwiftUI/AppKit menu bar development, since the scope is tightly bounded.
