Personal account or work account? A 610 KB Windows taskbar widget for Claude Code and Codex

Pablo De Chiaro Rosa — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 14:49:33 +0000

Personal account or work account? If you pay for Claude or ChatGPT yourself and your company gives you a seat, you know the feeling: you open the CLI, start a long task, and only later realize which account just spent its quota. Maybe it was your employer's.

I kept hitting this, so I built CCT (claude-codex-taskbar): a small strip on the Windows 11 / 10 taskbar that answers three questions at a glance:

Which account am I on? A short label of your choice (P, W, Me, Work…) sits right before the Claude and Codex gauges.
How much is left? The 5-hour and weekly limits of the account that is logged in right now, for Claude Code and for Codex, refreshed every 2 minutes. Hover for reset times.
Can I switch without /logout and /login? Yes: right-click the strip → Claude account → pick one. Claude Code uses it on its next request, with no restart.

Three rules I did not want to break

free forever: MIT, no paid tier, no account, no "pro" version.
tiny always: one native .exe of about < 1MB, written in Rust on raw Win32 + Direct2D. No runtime, no installer, no admin rights, about 15 MB of RAM, and zero telemetry.
3 clicks away: switching accounts is right-click, menu, pick. And it is always a click by you: CCT never switches on its own.

A few things I learned building it

Don't touch the tokens. CCT reuses the login the official claude and codex CLIs already saved, read-only. It never refreshes a token itself, so it never fights the CLI over the login. The one exception is the account switcher, and even then it writes only when you click, under Claude Code's own lock files, atomically, after backing up the outgoing login. Saved logins are encrypted with Windows DPAPI for your Windows user.

Never show 0% for an error. A gauge that says 0% because a request failed is worse than no gauge. When CCT can't read a value it shows — and puts the reason in the tooltip ("Codex login expired — run codex login").

Fallbacks matter more than the happy path. When the Codex usage endpoint fails, CCT asks the installed codex CLI, and as a last resort it reads the newest limit the CLI wrote in its own session logs, if that window has not reset yet.

Idle cost is a feature. A taskbar widget runs all day. Repainting only when something changed, keeping the Direct2D resources between frames and caching the taskbar lookup cut idle CPU by about 40% in v0.4.2.

Try it

Download: latest release, extract, run claude-codex-taskbar.exe.
Guides: check Claude Code usage on Windows · check Codex limits · switch Claude Code accounts
Source and issues: github.com/chiarorosa/claude-codex-taskbar. Testers on unusual setups (multi-monitor, high DPI, auto-hide taskbar) are very welcome.

CCT is an independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic or OpenAI.

DEV Community: Pablo De Chiaro Rosa

Personal account or work account? A 610 KB Windows taskbar widget for Claude Code and Codex

Three rules I did not want to break

A few things I learned building it

Try it