pi-dumb-zone

A pi coding agent footer built around a colored context-usage bar. As the context window fills, the bar goes green → orange → red to warn you that you may be drifting into the dumb zone: a context so full the model starts dropping details and getting sloppy. Around it the footer also shows git branch and path, token/cost stats, the active model and thinking level, and Anthropic subscription usage.

⎇  master • ~/projects/app                            claude-opus-4-8 • high
↑120k ↓8.4k • R90k W12k • $0.41 • S45% (2h 13m) W73% (5d)   62% ███████░░░░░ (620k/1.0M)

The footer is two rows:

• Row 1 — left: git branch • working directory; right: model name • thinking level.
• Row 2 — left: session token stats (↑sent ↓received • Rcache-read Wcache-write • cost • subscription usage); right: the colored context-usage bar.

Segments are separated by a bullet; empty segments (no branch, no thinking level, no subscription data) are dropped. Works with any provider; only the subscription-usage segment is Anthropic-specific and simply hides for other providers.

The percentage and the whole bar are colored by absolute token usage:

• green (colors.green) while at or below thresholds.orangeAbove (default 200k)
• orange (colors.orange) while above that and at or below thresholds.redAbove (default 500k)
• red (colors.red) above thresholds.redAbove

The Claude subscription usage percentages use the same three colors, keyed on 70% and 90%.

After compaction, when the exact token count is briefly unknown, the widget renders ?% ░░░░░░░░░░░░ (?/1.0M).

Claude subscription usage

When you use an Anthropic model through an OAuth subscription (Claude Pro/Max via /login), Anthropic returns rate-limit headers that this extension reads via the after_provider_response event. It shows the session window (S, roughly a 5-hour rolling limit) and the weekly window (W), each with the percentage of the allowance consumed and a compact time until reset. With a raw API key or a non-Anthropic model these headers are absent and the segment is hidden. Disable it with showClaudeUsage: false.

Install

From the pi package catalog:

pi install npm:pi-dumb-zone

Or from the git repo:

pi install git:github.com/stylesuxx/pi-dumb-zone

Commands

• /dumbzone toggles the footer on and off (restores the built-in footer when off).
• /dumbzone-reload re-reads the config file from disk.

Configuration

Configuration layers, lowest to highest precedence:

1. Built-in defaults.
2. Global: ~/.pi/agent/dumbzone.json.
3. Project: .pi/dumbzone.json (only when the project is trusted).

All fields are optional; missing fields fall back to the defaults. See dumbzone.example.json.

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
thresholds.orangeAbove	number	200000	Absolute tokens above which the bar turns orange.
thresholds.redAbove	number	500000	Absolute tokens above which the bar turns red.
colors.green	hex	#3fb950	Color for the low (green) state.
colors.orange	hex	#d29922	Color for the medium (orange) state.
colors.red	hex	#f85149	Color for the high (red) state.
barWidth	number	12	Number of cells in the progress bar.
showModel	boolean	true	Show the active model name on the right.
showClaudeUsage	boolean	true	Show Anthropic subscription session/weekly usage when available.
filledChar	string	█	Character for filled bar cells.
emptyChar	string	░	Character for empty bar cells.

The three state colors are 6-digit hex, rendered as 24-bit ANSI. Labels, paths, cost, and other dim text still come from the active pi theme; only the green/orange/red states are fixed hex so they stay legible across themes.

Notes

The footer only renders in interactive TUI mode. In print, JSON, and RPC modes the extension is a no-op.

Development

The pure logic (config, colors, formatting, header parsing, rendering) lives in core.ts with no pi-runtime imports, so it is unit-tested in isolation. index.ts is the thin runtime glue.

npm install
npm test        # node:test suite over core.ts
npm run typecheck