I told Claude Code to build its own status line

I wanted the bar at the bottom of my prompt to tell me two things: what branch I’m on, and how close I am to my usage limit before I kick off something big. I didn’t write a line of bash. I told Claude Code to build me a status line — and it did, then we tweaked it back and forth until it looked right.

Here’s ours:

💬 add-usage-statusline  🤖 Opus 4.8 (1M context) [high]
📁 nicecode  🌿 feat/claude-statusline (2f +63/-4)
5h ██░░░░░░ 34% ↻2h16m  │  wk █░░░░░░░ 18% ↻Sat 10:40  │  ctx 22%

The reason this is so little work is that the status line is just a script. Claude Code runs whatever you point it at and pipes it a JSON blob on stdin, and that blob already has the good stuff worked out for you. The branch, the files changed and lines added/removed, the model and its effort level, how much of the context window is gone — you don’t compute any of it, you just pick what to show:

echo "$json" | jq -r '.workspace.current_dir'        # which project
echo "$json" | jq -r '.cost.total_lines_added'        # +63
echo "$json" | jq -r '.context_window.used_percentage' # 22

The part I didn’t expect was the usage limits. rate_limits.five_hour and rate_limits.seven_day come right in the blob — each with a used_percentage and a resets_at timestamp. That’s the entire reason I built the thing, and it turned out to already be sitting there. Now the prompt answers “am I about to hit the limit” before I ask. /usage is a command I stopped typing.

Drop the script path in ~/.claude/settings.json and it’s global across every project. Add refreshInterval: 1 and it keeps ticking while you’re idle, so the “resets in 2h16m” countdown stays honest while a long tool call runs.

One caveat worth knowing: rate_limits only shows up on Pro/Max, and only after the first message of a session — so a brand-new session starts without it for a beat. Fine once you handle the empty case.

The fun part isn’t the bar. It’s that “build me a status line that shows X, Y and Z” is now the whole task — and everything you’d want to put on it is already in the envelope.

Follow-up resources

• Customize your status line — Claude Code docs — every field in the stdin blob, including rate_limits, cost, and context_window.
• ccstatusline — a configurable pre-built bar if you’d rather not describe your own.
• starship-claude — drives the Claude Code status line from a Starship config.
• jq — the JSON parser pulling fields out of the blob.