A cost dashboard tells you how much you spent. It almost never tells you why.
$340 in exploration — an agent re-reading the same three files across five failed attempts before it finds the right approach — looks identical, on most dashboards, to $340 that shipped a feature. Same currency, same token count, completely different story.
A breakdown of Anthropic's enterprise analytics on Finout put it well: the console can tell you how much a workspace spent, but "what it can't tell you is which human beings caused it" — or, I'd add, what kind of work caused it. Someone asked for exactly this gap to be closed in a dev.to comment: "I want cost by workflow shape: exploration, implementation, review, failed attempts, and rework."
That's a harder thing to build than it sounds.
To classify a session by workflow shape you'd need to correlate agent logs (which you have) with what actually reached a commit (which lives somewhere else entirely — git, not the session file). And even then the signal is messy: not every expensive exploration is waste. Sometimes five failed attempts are what make the sixth one land in two minutes instead of twenty. A shape-based view that treats all "exploration" cost as bad would just train people to stop exploring, which is worse.
Where this is actually useful, I think, is pattern-spotting over weeks, not judging a single session. A project where exploration cost keeps climbing relative to shipped cost is telling you something — maybe the codebase got harder to navigate, maybe the task descriptions got vaguer. A project where it stays flat is probably fine. You only notice either way if cost is tagged with some notion of what the work was, not just a daily total.
It's a line we're exploring for Estela, the open-source CLI we're building that already splits AI cost and hours by project from your local Claude Code and Codex logs. Linking cost to commits to tell apart exploration-that-paid-off from exploration-that-didn't is the next question on the list, not one it answers today.
If your dashboard showed cost by workflow shape instead of by day, would you actually change anything?