| name | audit-spend |
| description | Use when someone asks what their Claude Code work has cost — "what did that cost", "how much have we spent", "where did the tokens go", "which model is burning the budget", "is the cache actually helping" — and wants it attributed to the work rather than a session total. Routes to /audit:usage. |
What the work cost
Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/commands/usage.md and follow it. This file only exists so the
question finds the command.
The free first move
/audit:usage --backfill needs no manifest, no setup and no agents. It reads the
transcripts already on disk and attributes past spend by phase, task, model, author and
day. If someone is asking what things cost, run this — do not first propose installing a
pipeline. It is the cheapest true answer available and it uses data they already have.
What this answers that /cost does not
/cost and /stats are session-scoped totals. This is spend attributed to plan units —
which phase, which task, which model, which person, with cache economics and cost-per-task.
Native OpenTelemetry has no phase or task in its attribute set, so this is not a nicer
rendering of the same numbers; it is a different join.
Print it, do not re-render it
audit-usage.py renders its own ASCII output. Print it verbatim. Laying the tables out
again costs tokens to answer a question about token cost, which is self-defeating — the
command file says this too, and it is the rule the rest of this plugin's output follows.
When a number would be a guess, there will not be one
If you are asked something the ledger cannot support — whether a cheaper model would do,
what the next phase will cost — check what the output actually says. The routing advisory
stays silent without enough in-repo evidence, and projections are suppressed below a sample
gate. That silence is the answer, not a gap to fill in with a price list.
