See what your AI coding tools are doing — locally, in your editor.

Claude Code cost tracking. Cursor token usage. Codex spend. Captures, normalises, and analyses tool-call activity across 33 adapters — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Cline, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Aider, Goose, Devin, and more. Zero telemetry. No data leaves your machine.

⚡ 5-minute quick start

1. You just installed the extension. Now what?

The extension wraps the observer binary — a small, local Go service that watches your AI tools' log files and exposes a dashboard. The binary either downloads automatically on first activation (~21 MB from GitHub Releases) or uses one you've installed elsewhere (npm install -g @superbased/observer works too).

2. Verify your install

Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / ⌘⇧P) and run:

SuperBased: Doctor

A terminal opens with a health-check. All four lines should show ✅. If anything fails, the error tells you what to fix.

3. The daemon starts itself

Nothing to do — the extension ships in auto mode. It attaches to a daemon you already have running, and otherwise starts one for you. It only ever stops a daemon it started itself, so a daemon you launched in a terminal is left alone when you close the editor.

Prefer to run it yourself?

observer start

Keep that terminal open. The extension attaches to it automatically.

4. Open the dashboard

SuperBased: Open Dashboard

Or click the spend indicator in the bottom-right status bar ($(graph) $0.00 until your AI tools generate activity).

The full React analytics dashboard renders inside a VS Code editor tab. This is where you see your metrics. Nine sections, all linked to your real captured activity:

Tab	Shows
Overview	Today's spend, top model, burn rate, month projection.
Sessions	Every AI coding session with cost, duration, tool — drill into action-by-action timelines.
Cost	Per-day / per-tool / per-model rollup with cache efficacy + compression savings.
Discovery	Cross-tool file overlap, stale re-reads, redundant command patterns.
Analysis	High-context turns, prior-month comparisons, cache-savings trend.
Settings	Schema-driven editor for every config knob in `~/.observer/config.toml`.

5. Capture an AI session

Open a terminal in VS Code. Click the down-arrow next to the + in the terminal panel → choose "AI Coding Tool (SuperBased-proxied)". The new terminal already has ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, OPENAI_BASE_URL, and ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH=true exported.

Run your AI CLI from that terminal:

claude     # or: cursor-agent, codex, cline-cli, gh copilot, …

Everything routes through the local proxy. Within ~30 seconds your session shows up in the dashboard with accurate token counts (not the ~3.4× over-bill you get from non-proxied JSONL adapters).

🎯 What you get

Surface	What it does	How to access
Status bar	Today's spend at a glance, polled every 60s. Hover for delta vs yesterday, top model, burn rate, month projection.	Bottom-right corner. Click → open dashboard.
Sidebar	Four trees — Today, Sessions, Discovery, Costs (7d) — refreshed automatically.	Click the SuperBased icon in the activity bar (left rail).
Dashboard webview	The full React analytics SPA in an editor tab. Same surface as `http://127.0.0.1:8081/`.	`SuperBased: Open Dashboard` or status-bar click.
File freshness	Small dot in the file explorer next to files your AI tools touched in the last 24h. Hover shows last-read-by, edit count, stale re-reads flagged.	Just open a file — visible immediately.
Notifications	Budget breach (80% of monthly cap) + watcher-lag warnings. Deduped so they don't nag.	Automatic. Tunable thresholds in settings.
Terminal profile	"AI Coding Tool (SuperBased-proxied)" — pre-exports proxy env vars so AI CLIs launched from it route through observer.	Terminal panel → dropdown next to `+` → pick the profile.
Instruction-file CodeLens	"Refresh from SuperBased learnings" + "Preview suggestions" on `CLAUDE.md` / `AGENTS.md` / `.cursorrules`. Auto-updates the file from your captured patterns.	Open one of those three files — appears at the top.
Get Started walkthrough	7-step interactive tour.	Help → Welcome → "Get Started with SuperBased".

⚙️ Settings

Setting	Default	Purpose
`observer.daemon.mode`	`auto`	`auto` attaches if a daemon is running, otherwise spawns one (and only stops what it spawned); `managed` behaves the same; `detect` attaches only and never spawns.
`observer.binary.path`	empty	Absolute path to override binary auto-detection.
`observer.dashboard.port`	`8081`	Where the dashboard listens.
`observer.proxy.port`	`8820`	Where the API reverse proxy listens.
`observer.statusBar.enabled`	`true`	Today-spend status bar item.

🎛️ Common commands

Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / ⌘⇧P) and type SuperBased:

Command	Use it when
`SuperBased: Open Dashboard`	You want to see your metrics.
`SuperBased: Doctor`	Something seems off — health-check the install.
`SuperBased: Start Daemon`	You picked `managed` or `auto` mode and need to (re)start.
`SuperBased: Copy Proxy Env Vars`	You want to set up proxy routing in an existing terminal.
`SuperBased: Refresh All Trees`	The sidebar feels stale.

🤖 Supported AI tools

Claude Code (CLI + IDE) — via proxy + MCP server
Cursor (CLI + IDE) — via proxy + agent-transcripts
Codex / Codex CLI — via proxy
Cline (VS Code) + Roo Code + Continue — via proxy
Cline CLI (npm cline 3.0.20+) — via JSONL adapter (SQLite + per-session <id>.messages.json)
GitHub Copilot CLI — via JSONL adapter (no proxy hook available upstream)
Cowork + Opencode + Openclaw + Pi — via JSONL adapter
Antigravity (desktop + agy CLI) + WindSurf — via watcher
Hermes Agent (Nous Research) — via Python plugin hooks + SQLite backfill (observer init --hermes)
Kilo Code (legacy IDE extension kilocode.kilo-code — Cline + Roo fork) + Kilo Code CLI (@kilocode/cli, OpenCode fork) — via JSONL / SQLite adapters
Aider, Goose, Devin, Qoder, Crush, Kimi Code, Grok, Kiro CLI, Qwen Code — via JSONL / SQLite adapters
Factory droid, Open Interpreter, Command Code — via JSONL adapters

33 adapters total. Five more (chatgpt-web, claude-web, perplexity-web, gemini-web, copilot-web) capture browser-based chat via an opt-in browser extension that today installs unpacked only — not yet in the Chrome Web Store.

Full integration details in the user guide.

🔒 Privacy + local-first

Zero telemetry. Respects telemetry.telemetryLevel. No usage reporting, no crash analytics, no session beacons.
No outbound network calls at runtime. The only network traffic the extension ever generates is the first-install binary download from GitHub Releases when no observer is found locally. After that, all communication is to 127.0.0.1:<dashboard.port> on your workspace host.
No data leaves your machine. Every byte captured stays in ~/.observer/observer.db.
Codespaces / Remote-SSH / WSL2 / Dev Containers all work via portMapping — data still doesn't cross any wire that wasn't already part of your VS Code remote-dev session.

📖 Going deeper

User Guide — long-form walkthrough: daily workflow, per-AI-tool integration, customisation recipes, troubleshooting.
Reference Docs — full command + settings reference + compatibility matrix.
GitHub — source, issues, releases.

💬 Help

Issues: github.com/superbasedapp/observer/issues
Discussions: github.com/superbasedapp/observer/discussions
Output channel: View → Output → SuperBased shows everything the extension is doing — include the relevant excerpt when filing bugs.

_{Built with Go + TypeScript. Apache-2.0 licensed. Zero telemetry.}

SuperBased