Why a monitor lizard
I kept hitting AI plan limits mid-task, so I put the numbers where I can glance at them.
I kept running into the limits of my AI plans in the middle of a task. A long session would be going well, and then a message would tell me to wait until the window reset. By then I had lost my place, and sometimes an hour of the day.
The numbers existed, since each provider shows usage somewhere, usually a few clicks deep, on a page I only opened after something had already gone wrong. I wanted them in front of me while I worked, the way a fuel gauge sits in front of a driver.
Before: the limit finds me
- A long session is going well.
- A message says to wait for the window to reset.
- I lose my place, and sometimes an hour.
After: I see it coming
- A dial on screen climbs as I work.
- It turns red while there is still room.
- I move the work early and keep going.
A small widget that stays on top
So I built one: Monizard is a small window that sits on top of the desktop, or an icon in the menu bar or tray if you prefer that. Each plan gets a pair of dials with tick marks: one for the short window and one for the week.
A dial fills with lit ticks as the plan is used, and the number in the middle says how much. A small mark on the rim shows how far through the day it is, so you can tell whether a reading of, say, 60 percent is fine or a problem.
If you use more than one account, it reads each of them and shows them side by side. That was the part I wanted most, because choosing between two accounts is exactly the decision I used to make by guessing.
- 1Lit ticks: how much of the window is used.
- 2The reading, as a percentage.
- 3The day mark: how far through the day it is.
- 4Unlit ticks: what is left.
The colour of the lit ticks carries the meaning, so a glance is enough. There are three states.
| Colour | What it means | What I usually do |
|---|---|---|
| Green | There is room for the rest of the window. | Start something large without worrying about it. |
| Gold | Use is ahead of the day: at this rate the window runs out early. | Keep going, but save the big tasks for later or for another account. |
| Red | A limit is close. | Move work to another account, or switch to a smaller task. |
The day mark is what turns a number into an answer. The same reading means different things at ten in the morning and at four in the afternoon, and the dial shows that difference without any arithmetic.
The day is young and 60 percent is gone. Gold: ahead of the day.
Most of the day has passed and 40 percent is left. Green: on pace.
Why a lizard
The widget already had a character before I had a name for the project. It is a black-and-gold monitor lizard. It looks around, and when nothing needs attention it curls up and goes to sleep.
Then the pun arrived on its own. A monitor lizard that does monitoring. I tried a few other names and none of them stuck, so the lizard stayed and so did the name.
Nothing needs you
Time to check the dials
I like that the character does part of the job. A sleeping lizard tells you that nothing needs you. A lizard that is awake and looking at you is a prompt to check the dials.
That is a quieter signal than a notification, and I do not have to learn a new dashboard to understand it.
What it changed for me
The biggest change is that I stopped being surprised. When the week dial is red on a Wednesday, I know to move some work to another account or to a smaller task. When both dials are green, I can start something large without worrying about it.
It also showed me my own habits, which I would not have noticed from a page I only open when I am stuck.
Seeing the weekly dial climb faster than the day mark showed me that I front-load my week, and that I tend to leave the end of it unused.
Where this leads
What you see on screen is only half of it. The readings are also written to a small file that scripts and agents can read, which I describe in the next post.
Since then the lizard has taken on other things I depend on, such as whether a website answers or whether a scheduled job reported in, and the third post is about how I use those.
The AI plans came first, and watching them has been enough to stop me losing afternoons to a limit I could have seen coming.