Troubleshooting

Common issues and how to diagnose them.

"No sessions found"

claudex sessions
# (empty)

• Did you run claude locally at least once? claudex only reads what Claude Code has written.
• Does ls ~/.claude/projects/ show directories? If not, Claude Code hasn't persisted anything yet.
• If you point CLAUDE_HOME or similar elsewhere, claudex still looks at ~/.claude/ — there's no override yet.

Costs look too low / too high

Costs are estimated, not invoiced. For Claude, Codex, and Copilot CLI they come from locally recorded token-usage blocks multiplied by the matching published model tier, including OpenAI Astra / Sol / Terra / Luna. Pi and OpenClaw use provider-reported costs when available, while VS Code Copilot Chat has no local token counts and reports $0.

• Too low? Check for mixed-model sessions. Each message is priced by its own model, so a session that started with Opus and finished with Sonnet shows a blended cost.
• Too high? Cache-read tokens dominate long sessions. See Pricing model.
• Always rounding to $0.00? It doesn't — sub-cent values fall back to four decimal places. If you still see $0.00, check the token counts with --json.

claudex watch shows nothing

Watch tails a file that Claude Code hasn't written to. You need --debug-file:

claude --debug-file ~/.claudex/debug/latest.log

Without that flag, Claude Code doesn't dump anything to the watch path. See Watch mode.

Search returns no hits for a term you know exists

• FTS5 tokenizes words with the porter unicode61 analyzer. Symbols like {, [, ., / aren't tokens — search for the word next to them instead.
• Case-sensitive search falls back to a full file scan. Slower but authoritative.
• Make sure the index is fresh: claudex index.

Index seems stuck / wrong

Nuke and rebuild:

claudex index --force

If that still looks wrong, run with --no-index to bypass the cache:

claudex cost --no-index

If the --no-index output disagrees with the indexed output, that's a bug — please open an issue.

Spinner keeps appearing on every run

The staleness window is 5 minutes. If your system clock is wrong or you frequently skip across time zones, the index may think it's always stale. Check date and your timezone.

COLUMNS is wrong

Inside some terminal multiplexers, terminal_size can misread. Override:

COLUMNS=180 claudex cost

Colors show as garbage in output

You probably piped color-enabled output into a tool that doesn't speak ANSI. Use --color never:

claudex cost --color never | your-tool

Or rely on Auto to drop color when stdout isn't a TTY.

Build fails with "rustc 1.94 is not supported"

claudex requires Rust 1.95 or newer. Upgrade:

rustup update stable

If you use Nix, the devshell pins the correct toolchain automatically.

I see permission errors writing to ~/.claudex/

Make sure the directory is writable. If you want to redirect it, use CLAUDEX_DIR:

export CLAUDEX_DIR=/tmp/claudex
claudex summary

Still stuck?

• Run claudex <cmd> --no-index --json and compare against the indexed output. Divergence = bug.
• File an issue with a reproducible snippet: https://github.com/utensils/claudex/issues