Quickstart

This is the five-minute tour. It assumes you've installed claudex and run at least one of Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Pi, or OpenClaw locally so there are transcripts to index.

1. See the dashboard

claudex summary

You'll get one screenful: total sessions, today/this-week counts, cost totals, top projects, top tools, model distribution, and the most recent session.

First run indexes every provider's transcripts (~/.claude/projects, ~/.codex, ~/.copilot, VS Code workspaceStorage, ~/.pi/agent, ${OPENCLAW_STATE_DIR:-~/.openclaw}) — the spinner shows progress on stderr. Subsequent runs reuse the index (5-minute staleness window), so they're near-instant.

2. Narrow by provider

Every report spans all six providers by default. Narrow with --provider:

claudex cost --provider codex          # just OpenAI Codex
claudex cost --provider copilot        # just GitHub Copilot CLI
claudex sessions --provider pi         # just Pi
claudex search "timeout" --provider openclaw --json
claudex cost --provider claude,codex   # Claude + Codex combined

See Providers & filtering for the full filter set.

3. Cost, by project

claudex cost --limit 10

Aggregates token usage across every session in each project and every provider, applies the correct pricing tier per model (Fable / Opus / Sonnet / Haiku, OpenAI gpt-5 / gpt-4; Pi/OpenClaw report their own cost when available; Copilot is priced at API-equivalent rates), and sorts by cost descending.

Add --per-session to break it out by individual session, --project utensils to filter to projects whose path contains utensils, or --since 30d to scope to the last 30 days.

4. Full-text search

claudex search "schema migration"
claudex search serde --project claudex --limit 5

Uses SQLite's FTS5 virtual table. Case-insensitive by default; pass --case-sensitive to drop back to a file scan (FTS5 doesn't support case-sensitive queries).

Each hit shows the project, session ID prefix, date, role, and the matching line with the query highlighted.

5. Tool and model usage

claudex tools --limit 15     # How often you reach for Bash, Edit, Read, ...
claudex models               # Calls, token usage, cost per model

6. Export a session

# Find a recent session and grab its prefix
claudex sessions --limit 5

# Export as Markdown (default)
claudex export e1a2f4 --output my-session.md

# Or as JSON
claudex export e1a2f4 --format json --output my-session.json

The selector matches by session-ID prefix or by project name (substring). Combine --project for disambiguation when a short prefix is ambiguous.

Bonus: pipe to jq

Every report supports --json:

# Top three cost projects, numeric only
claudex cost --json --limit 3 \
  | jq '.[] | {project, cost_usd}'

# p95 turn duration for one project
claudex turns --project claudex --json \
  | jq '.[0].p95_duration_ms'

Bonus: live tail

When you want structured output from a running Claude Code session:

# In one shell
claudex watch

# In another shell
claude --debug-file ~/.claudex/debug/latest.log

claudex watches the debug log, formats tool calls, and inserts a banner every time claude starts a new session (which truncates the log).

See Watch mode for details.

Where next?

• The index — when it syncs, when to force a rebuild.
• Commands overview — every subcommand.
• Recipes — one-liners for common questions.