abtop vs tare
htop for AI coding agents: every Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode session in one TUI — tokens, context-window %, rate limits, child processes, orphan ports. Read-only, no API keys. Rust. — versus — Claude Code skill that reads your local session logs and answers 'where did my tokens go' in plain English: deduplicated totals, cost charged to the tool that caused it, 5-hour window state.
Both surface token and context burn across sessions. abtop is live htop over running agents; tare works from logs after the fact, which is the only way to catch background automation you didn't know was running.
| abtop | tare | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 3.5k | 161 |
| Forks | 315 | 8 |
| Language | Rust | Python |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Last activity | 1 months ago | 3 days ago |
| Topics | coding | coding, skills, local |
| Curated connections | 7 | 7 |
abtop — the curator's take
The moment you run 3+ agents in parallel this earns its place: live per-session context-window bars, real-time rate-limit quota, and the sleeper feature — orphan port detection for the dev server an agent forgot to kill. Read-only from local process/file state, cross-platform, Enter jumps to the agent's terminal (tmux/cmux aware). NOT an analytics tool: it's a live dashboard, not history — for cost breakdowns, replays and budgets over time you want a session-log analyzer, not a top. OpenCode monitoring needs the sqlite3 CLI installed.
tare — the curator's take
Install it the day you get rate-limited and can't explain why. Two things make it better than the usual token dashboard: it deduplicates Claude Code's repeated response records (~86% inflation on the author's data), and it charges tokens to the tool that *caused* the re-sends rather than the one that returned bytes — which is how one big early file read quietly dominates a week. It is diagnosis, not control: no budgets, no blocking, no compaction, nothing changes your behaviour for you. Claude Code only, so multi-harness shops want a cross-CLI ledger instead. Everything stays local, and SECURITY.md tells you which greps verify that.