Paying Anthropic to rice my Fedora

Total cost: $7.34
Total duration (API): 32m 9s
Total duration (wall): 1h 44m 42s
Total code changes: 1435 lines added, 334 lines removed
Usage by model:
claude-haiku-4-5: 85.2k input, 3.8k output, 0 cache read, 0 cache write ($0.1041)
claude-sonnet-4-5: 1.8k input, 82.1k output, 10.6m cache read, 220.3k cache write ($7.23)

That's how much it costed to make my setup look exactly how I wanted, using Claude Code, without manually fiddling with any configs.

Modus Operandi

I set up a common folder to store a "design system" of sorts. This folder consisted of the look I wanted in the form of css files. The color pallete, the border radius, all of these things were stored as tokens.

Then the task is to configure waybar, rofi and hyprland itself to use these tokens. Here I relied on Claude Code to do the heavy-lifting and apply these tokens meticulously.

Review

For the most part it worked out great and out of the box. For example, I use Asahi on my MacbookPro 14" and have enabled the top section(notch part) and it worked out waybar height perfectly.

It was also great at doing the tedious part like centering icons in waybar and figuring out click and hover output and the source of data as well.

Naturally, it doesn't have any taste and things looked pretty "generic" with first iteration. I have done some minor changes, but nothing ground-breaking.

But I think the common "design-system" part should come handy when I want it look drastically different or particularly mine.

Demo

Conclusion

Dread, is what I have felt whenever I have thought about setting up my laptop in a way that can come close to what I see on r/unixporn.

I really, really don't enjoy mucking around with configs, what I do enjoy is a pretty and useful setup. Using Claude to do cleanup and tedious work seems just about the right application.

I guess $7.34 is the price I am willing to pay to get the goods without the headache.