If you use more than one AI coding agent, you already know the pain. Claude Code lives in its own transcripts. Cursor has its own usage UI. Codex has another. OpenCode keeps a local SQLite database. Each tool is fine alone. Together they become a fog of terminals, tokens, and "wait, which model did I use last night?"
SuperBased is a local-first control plane for that stack. It runs on your machine, watches the agents you already use, and gives you one place to see cost, sessions, and activity without shipping your code to a SaaS analytics product.
The problem is not "AI coding"
The problem is fragmentation.
Most teams (and many solo builders) now run two or three agents in parallel:
- Cursor for IDE edits
- Claude Code or Codex for longer terminal sessions
- OpenCode or another OSS agent for experiments
Each one bills differently. Each one logs differently. None of them was designed to be the system of record for all of your agent spend. So you either:
- Ignore cost until the invoice hurts, or
- Mantain a spreadsheet of screenshots and gut feel
Neither scales when agents start running overnight.
What a control plane actually means
A control plane sits beside the agents. It does not replace them.
For SuperBased that means:
- Observe sessions across adapters (OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and more)
- Price tokens with a local model table so you can compare tools in one currency: dollars
- Stay local by default: read logs and SQLite on disk; optional localhost proxy when you want provider-exact counts
- Guardrails for egress and routing when you are ready to go beyond "just watching"
The point is not another chat UI. The point is operational control: what ran, what it cost, and whether it stayed on your machine.
Local-first is the feature
Cloud "AI observability" products want your traces. That is a hard sell when the payload is your private repos and agent conversations.
SuperBased's default posture is the opposite:
- No account required for core local tracking
- Dashboard on
http://127.0.0.1:8081 - Data stays in your observer DB and the tools' own local stores
You can still opt into richer proxy routing later. You should not have to upload a week of agent history just to answer "what did OpenCode cost me on Tuesday?"
A simple mental model
Think in three layers:
- Agents write code (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, ...)
- Control plane (SuperBased) normalizes sessions, cost, and policy
- You decide budgets, models, and when to kill a runaway loop
Most of the market sells layer 1. Layer 2 is where multi-agent chaos actually gets managed.
Who this is for
- Solo builders burning tokens across two or three CLIs
- Teams standardizing on "agents in the loop" without a shared cost view
- Anyone who wants OSS-friendly, local-first tooling instead of another hosted dashboard
If you only ever use one agent and never look at cost, you may not need this yet. The moment you juggle tools, you do.
Try it
npm install -g @superbased/observer
observer start
# open http://127.0.0.1:8081
Site: superbased.app
If you want a hands-on OpenCode walkthrough (install, Groq, session cost), that lives on our Substack. This piece is the wider thesis: one local control plane for the whole agent stack.
Tags
ai, devtools, opensource, productivity, machinelearning
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