[FEATURE] Visible context-window usage indicator in Cowork (parity with Codex / Claude Code status line)

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Note: I searched existing requests and found this was previously requested in #37568 (closed as not planned/stale) and is related to #20041, #38605, #59895. I'm re-raising it with a fresh use case and a concrete, minimal UI proposal.

I just spoke with Aaron Kovar, who gave an excellent session to about 200 folks at Accenture and stayed another 10 minutes past the hour fielding questions. Big shoutout to Aaron and the product teams that make Claude a real thing.

I was an early user of Claude Code (multiple Ghostty panes, keeping close track of context rot, building Ralph loops) and something I appreciated about CC was having visibility in my statusline on context utilization, so I knew when to restart a session, or when unneeded MCPs or a bloated CLAUDE.md were crowding my context window, or when a process was reading more input than it needed to do the job.

In my day job, I see my teams wondering why performance degrades after multiple compactions, and when I tell them about context rot, I find it hard to explain/educate without a visual aid (i.e., a status line, or calling /context), or the context utilization UI feature in the Codex IDE. I want to use my enterprise Cowork for more functional workflows, I want to educate my teams on best practices, and I imagine other Claude power users are looking for this too as the industry settles on the feature set essential to the modern, agentic-first IDE.

I just want to put in a plug that it would help with educating teams on context utilization, achieving parity with what the Codex IDE already has, and making for a gentler transition for people (and esp the power users) coming to Cowork from Claude Code who are used to the feature.

Proposed Solution

Keep it simple to start: a small circular context bar next to the model name and version that fills up as we approach the compaction limit, with a % context utilization integer in the middle. It turns green, yellow, then red as it crosses thresholds (say green up to ~50%, yellow ~65%, red ~80%+) so you get a see the visual signal before compaction hits. That alone would cover most of what I need to teach context rot to my teams. Anything fancier (compaction transparency, a /context breakdown, other ways to audit context) feels extra at this point.

Alternative Solutions

Alternative solutions: use Claude Code, Pi, Codex IDE.

Priority

Medium - Would be very helpful

Feature Category

Developer tools/SDK

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

_No response_