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ai-conversation-impact/impact-toolkit/README.md
claude 0543a43816 Initial commit: AI conversation impact methodology and toolkit 
CC0-licensed methodology for estimating the environmental and social
costs of AI conversations (20+ categories), plus a reusable toolkit
for automated impact tracking in Claude Code sessions.
2026-03-16 09:46:49 +00:00

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Claude Code Impact Toolkit

Track the environmental and financial cost of your Claude Code conversations.

What it does

A PreCompact hook that runs before each context compaction, capturing:

  • Token counts (actual from transcript or heuristic estimate)
  • Cache usage breakdown (creation vs. read)
  • Energy consumption estimate (Wh)
  • CO2 emissions estimate (grams)
  • Financial cost estimate (USD)

Data is logged to a JSONL file for analysis over time.

Install

# Project-level (recommended)
cd your-project
./path/to/impact-toolkit/install.sh

# Or user-level (applies to all projects)
./path/to/impact-toolkit/install.sh --user

Requirements: bash, jq, python3.

View results

.claude/hooks/show-impact.sh              # all sessions
.claude/hooks/show-impact.sh <session_id> # specific session

How it works

The hook fires before Claude Code compacts your conversation context. It reads the conversation transcript, extracts token usage data from API response metadata, and calculates cost estimates using:

  • Energy: 0.003 Wh/1K input tokens, 0.015 Wh/1K output tokens
  • PUE: 1.2 (data center overhead)
  • CO2: 325g/kWh (US grid average for cloud regions)
  • Cost: $15/M input tokens, $75/M output tokens

Cache-read tokens are weighted at 10% of full cost (they skip most computation).

Limitations

  • All numbers are estimates with low to medium confidence.
  • Energy-per-token figures are derived from published research on comparable models, not official Anthropic data.
  • The hook only runs on context compaction, not at conversation end. Short conversations that never compact will not be logged.
  • See impact-methodology.md for the full methodology, uncertainty analysis, and non-quantifiable costs.

Files

impact-toolkit/
  install.sh                       # installer
  hooks/pre-compact-snapshot.sh    # PreCompact hook
  hooks/show-impact.sh             # log viewer
  README.md                        # this file

License

MIT. See LICENSE in the repository root.