Date: 2026-09-08
pi-auch puts model quota information in Pi’s footer.
At the moment it is mostly useful to me for OpenAI Codex. It shows the 5-hour and weekly usage windows, how long until they reset, and an increasingly distressed little reaction as the numbers go up.
That last part is not strictly necessary.
It may be the part I like most.
pi-auch did not begin because I had discovered an unsolved problem.
I was already using
pi-usage, which did considerably more.
It could work with several providers I was using or experimenting with, including
Codex and GitHub Copilot, and it had support for other services too.
The difficulty is that providers do not all make quota information equally easy to obtain. Some require fairly indirect ways of finding out what is left. At one point the Copilot check in the tool I was using involved sending a tiny model request. When Copilot’s behaviour around minimum output changed, that started causing problems for me.
That was not really the other tool’s fault. If a provider does not expose a neat usage endpoint, a usage checker has to get creative.
I could have forked the existing project and fixed the particular thing that was bothering me.
Instead I wondered how small a version I could make for the providers I actually used.
This is apparently how I acquire software now.
I initially tried to reproduce more of the provider coverage I had before. In practice, Codex turned out to be the pleasant case.
Pi can resolve my existing openai-codex authentication, and OpenAI exposes the
usage information in a form that pi-auch can query directly. That gives me the
two quota windows I care about, their percentages, and their reset times without
having to send a sacrificial message to a model just to ask whether I have any
messages left.
Copilot is less tidy. pi-auch can tell whether it is configured, and after I actually use Copilot it can passively learn quota information from recognised response headers when those are available. It does not send a model probe merely to manufacture usage information.
I would still like that side to become more useful if there is a clean way to do it. For now that matters less because Codex is what I use most.
The result is a much narrower tool than the one that inspired it. That is not a criticism of the larger tool. I have simply made my own problem smaller.
I wanted the name to sound like some variation of “another usage checker” or “yet another usage checker.”
I also wanted it to sound as though checking the quota had physically hurt.
In English that would normally be ouch. In Portuguese, auch felt close
enough to the noise I had in mind. More importantly, it gave me pi-auch.
Once I had committed to that joke, merely printing 47% in a tasteful colour
felt like a missed opportunity.
So the footer now gets progressively less happy as quota disappears. A healthy
window might get 🙂 nice. Later it becomes 😬 ohhh, then 😖 auch!, and,
when things have become sufficiently regrettable, 🤕 AUCH!!.
The reaction system came after the basic idea. The name gave it permission.
The practical reason for all of this is extremely boring.
I do not want to open a usage page while I am working. Pi already has a footer. The number can live there.
pi-auch refreshes the information periodically and /auch gives me the fuller
version when I want it. Most of the time I just glance at the footer and carry
on.
It does not switch models for me. It does not tell the model to conserve tokens. It does not decide that a task is too frivolous for the remaining quota. A percentage has no idea whether I am doing a final review or spending twenty minutes arguing with CSS.
It just tells me how much the current situation hurts.
That seems like enough responsibility for one footer extension.
pi-auch ended up alongside a few other small things I have been making around Pi. pi-sych is the much larger experiment around project state, context, and disposable workers. pi-pew-pew gives models a read-only way to look at the web. pi-lease gives a particular Pi session an actual browser to work with.
I did not plan those as a product family. I have simply been enjoying making small tools whose boundaries I can still understand.
pi-auch may be the clearest example. It began with a useful tool that was doing more than I currently needed, a provider whose quota was unusually easy to ask about, and the question of how little code I could get away with.
Then I added a pain meter.
Obviously.
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