bough and the other Claude Code tools

Several tools read the history Claude Code leaves on your disk. They answer different questions, and the useful thing is knowing which question you have.

The short version: bough is for looking back at work that is finished. If you want to know what you spent, or what is running right now, or what you said in a conversation last Tuesday, one of the others is the better tool and this page will say so.

What each one is for

Where bough is the wrong choice

You want to know what you are spending. Use ccusage. It has been doing this for a long time, it is very good at it, and bough deliberately does not report cost. Adding a worse version of ccusage to bough would help nobody.

You want to know if you are about to run out of quota. Use Claude Code Usage Monitor, which forecasts against your actual limits. bough only looks backwards and has no opinion about what happens next.

You want to find a specific conversation. Use Claude Code History Viewer. It searches across eleven different coding assistants, not only Claude Code, and full-text search over conversations is exactly what it is built for. bough shows you a prompt when you click the shape it belongs to, which is a poor way to search.

You want to see your running sessions. There are a dozen good menu bar apps and status lines for that. bough does not watch anything live and will not tell you a session needs attention.

You only use Claude Code occasionally. The shape of a week with four prompts in it is not interesting. bough gets useful somewhere around a few hundred prompts on one project, when you genuinely cannot remember what happened.

Where bough is the right choice

You have lost track of a long stretch of work. Three weeks head down on one repository, and someone asks what you have been doing. A list of 181 prompts does not answer that. The shape does, in about two seconds.

You want to see the difference between work that landed and work that circled. Commits are drawn on the tasks they belong to, so a day that produced four commits looks different from a day that produced none. Everything else in the drawing is inferred; a commit either exists in your repository or it does not, and it is the one claim you can go and check.

You want to know where the hard parts were. bough marks work that took many attempts on the same files. It is a guess, it is labelled as a guess, and it is off by default. Which brings us to the honest part.

What is not settled

bough works out where one task ends and the next begins from pauses and from which files were being touched. That segmentation is fitted to one person's history, and it has one external check: if the boundaries were right, commits should cluster near the ends of tasks. Measured across four projects, they land at mean position 0.55 through a task, against 0.50 for pure chance. That is a slight lean, not the clustering you would want to see.

So the day and prompt boundaries are solid, because those come from timestamps and records rather than from a heuristic. The task boundaries in between are a best guess and may not match how you remember the work.

The struggle score sits on top of that segmentation and is unproven, which is why it is off unless you ask for it.

None of the tools above have this problem, because none of them try to infer structure. They show you what is in the file. bough is attempting something harder, and the price is that some of it is a guess.

What they have in common

Everything on this page runs locally and reads files already on your disk. Nothing here sends your history anywhere. That appears to be a settled norm in this corner of the ecosystem, and it is a good one.

Using more than one

These are not really competitors. ccusage and bough answer questions that do not overlap at all, and plenty of people will want both: what did this cost, and what did it produce. They read the same files and neither writes to them, so running both is fine.