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Praful Reddy
Praful Reddy

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A zero-token progress bar for Claude Code

#claudecode #productivity #terminal #python

Every Claude Code extension I've seen shows the same thing: token counts, API costs, model info. Useful, but it doesn't answer the question I actually care about mid-session — how much of the work is done.
So I built task-progress-bar. It reads Claude Code's native task list from disk and renders a live ASCII progress bar with time estimates. It runs as a PostToolUse hook, which means it consumes zero tokens — it's a subprocess that Claude never sees.

Tasks [████████░░] 8/10 (~3m left) | ✓8 ⟳1 ○1

How it works

Claude Code persists tasks as JSON files in ~/.claude/tasks/. The plugin watches for TodoWrite, TodoRead, TaskCreate, and TaskUpdate tool calls via the PostToolUse hook, then:

  1. Parses every JSON file in the tasks directory
  2. Counts completed, in-progress, and pending tasks
  3. Computes a time estimate using an exponential moving average (EMA)
  4. Outputs a single status line to Claude Code's statusLine renderer

The time estimation is straightforward. Each time a task moves to completed, the timestamp is logged. The interval between consecutive completions feeds into an EMA with α=0.3:

EMA_new = 0.3 × latest_interval + 0.7 × EMA_old
estimated_remaining = EMA × tasks_left

Intervals over 1 hour are clamped to avoid skew from session breaks. The first 3 completions show "calculating..." until there's enough data.
The entire plugin is a single Python file — stdlib only, no pip dependencies. It uses json, pathlib, time, and sys. Nothing else.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PRAFULREDDYM/task-progress-bar/main/install.sh | bash

The installer checks for Python 3.8+, copies the script to ~/.claude/, and patches settings.json with the hook configuration. There's a matching uninstall.sh for clean removal.

What it looks like

The progress bar color-codes by completion percentage — red below 33%, yellow from 33–66%, green above 66%. When all tasks finish, it shows ✅ All done! for 30 seconds and then hides.
If you run it standalone (python3 task_progress_bar.py), you get a full multi-line colored view with a task breakdown and per-task average.

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