See what a piece of work cost

Read the AI spend for one piece of work, split by phase, and the cost across all your work.

What you'll do

Check that cost capture is on, then read the spend for one piece of work, phase by phase. Cost is read from your AI tool's own session records on your machine. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Steps

Check that capture is on for your tool:
```
aidlc cost hooks status
```
init turns it on. If your tool shows not installed, turn it on:
```
aidlc cost hooks install --platform claude-code
```
Use the name of your tool in place of claude-code.
Read the cost of one piece of work:
```
aidlc cost <instance>
```
You get one line per phase with its cost and time, then a total.
See every piece of work at once, or the average per template:
```
aidlc cost
aidlc cost --by-template
```
To see what a piece of work cost including the bugfixes it later caused, run aidlc metrics. Its true-cost figure adds those fixes to the work's own cost.

Check it worked

Run aidlc cost <instance> on a piece of work you have spent time on. You should see a dollar amount on its total: line. no data means capture was off while you worked — turn it on as in step 1, and the next session is counted.