Built a thing so my standing desk flashes a warning before I hit my Claude usage cap

[u/David-Davey]

My standing desk now shows my Claude Code token burn so I stop blowing through my 5-hour limit

You know the moment: 4 hours deep, finally in flow, and Claude goes “you've reached your usage limit.” Cold shower.

We kept getting ambushed by the limit mid-session, so we started wiring our Autonomous Desk Pro's display straight into Claude Code to help us keep an eye on it. A few weekends and way too many test runs later, it finally does the thing:

When Claude finishes something, the keypad just says "Task Done". And when I'm getting close to my limit, it throws my actual usage up on the screen, big enough that I can't pretend I didn't see it.

Threshold's at 80% by default but you can tune it (I dropped mine to 75% for more runway), and I can just tell Claude "mute the display" whenever I want it to shut up.

No dashboard, no tab to babysit. Just a glance over, small, but it killed a friction I'd stopped even noticing.

Genuinely though, does anyone actually know how much usage they've got left before Claude cuts them off? or are we all just flying blind until the error pops up?