Our own cost dashboard flagged the day it was born as a 26.5x overspend. The transcript said otherwise. Making sure it never happened to anyone else took a bug report, and three days later the fix shipped.
We build a lot of small internal dashboards. One of them tracks Claude Code token spend across the projects on this machine. It leans on an open-source engine called CodeBurn: free, local-only, reads session logs and estimates what each session would have cost on pay-as-you-go pricing. CodeBurn has a panel called optimize, and the panel's job is to flag waste. Sessions that cost far more than a project's own average, with no obvious reason why.
One day the panel flagged something inside its own house. The dashboard's build session, the day it came into existence, sat there marked as a 26.5x cost outlier. Twenty-six and a half times the project's own average. That is the kind of number designed to make you flinch.
We didn't flinch. We pulled the raw transcript.
What was actually in there
