Dev Audit Finds Claude Code Desktop App Overcounting Tokens by 2.34x, Fixed in 3 Days

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A software developer auditing token-tracking tools discovered that Clawdmeter, a desktop app displaying live Claude Code usage statistics, was inflating every transcript-derived token count by approximately 2.34 times. The bug stemmed from Claude Code writing single assistant messages as multiple JSONL records sharing the same usage object, causing the app's transcript.py to sum tokens once per record rather than per message. The auditor verified the defect by running the app's own unmodified functions against a synthetic corpus with a known-exact token manifest, yielding figures roughly 2.34 times higher than the true values. Maintainer weltern confirmed the bug on August 6, one day after the report was filed on August 5, and shipped a corrected version, v3.0.1, on August 8. The release notes proactively warned users that token and cost figures would drop by about 2.5 times, clarifying that the reduction was the fix and not a regression.

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