v2.26.0 ·
The console counts tokens, not dollars
aidlc cost, aidlc status and the roadmap page already led with tokens. The console was the one
place I missed. Open bare aidlc and the header said $1.42 session. The SPEND panel showed the
session, today and the week in dollars, and drew its seven bars from dollar amounts.
On a Claude or Codex subscription, that dollar figure is an API price you never pay. The number that counts against your plan is tokens, and the screen you glance at most did not show it.
What changed
The header now reads 1.2M tok session. The SPEND panel shows the session, today and the week in the
same short form aidlc status uses, like 47.3M tok, and each of its seven bars is one day's tokens.
After each turn, the agent drawer and the Stream print session 1.2M tok where they used to print
session cost $0.50.
Nothing measured still means nothing measured. A session that has not run a turn shows –, and a day
with no ledger entries draws as ·. Never 0 tok, which would claim a measurement that did not
happen.
There is no dollar figure left anywhere in the console. That reached one spot the original item did
not name: the idle rows in the BUILDING panel showed the full status label, 1.2M tok · $10.00. They
now show the token half only. aidlc status still prints both halves, unchanged.
A fix hiding under the relabel
Swapping the unit was not enough. For Claude Code, the console's turn parser read only the dollar
figure from each turn's result and no tokens at all. So a Claude Code session's token count was
always 0. A straight relabel would have shipped a header stuck on –.
The parser now adds the input, output, cache read and cache write tokens from each Claude Code turn, the same four counters the ledger sums, so the session figure and the ledger agree. Codex keeps counting input plus output, as before.
Today and week come from the ledger, not the session. They sum the tokens of every instance ledger
and the unattributed pool, with the same read-time precedence aidlc cost uses. One change from the
old dollar sum: an entry no rate could price used to be skipped. Now its tokens count, because the
tokens were spent whether or not there is a price for them.
What it does not do
It does not know your plan. The console shows how many tokens you used, not how many you have left. Reading quotas or limits from the provider was out of scope, so you still compare the number to your plan yourself.
Eight existing test files asserted the dollar behaviour and had to be rewritten to assert tokens. Each changed source file, set back to the previous version, made its tests fail, which is the check that the new tests actually guard the change.