/usage help text does not explain mixed metric scopes
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Newbie friendliness
- 72/100
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Active
- Tech stack
- shell
- Domain
- cli, documentation
Research direction
Locate the /usage help text and the documentation referenced in the issue, then inspect how the command output labels its sections. Update the wording so local activity, current-session metrics, and plan-period quota scopes are explicit; verify the help text and rendered output no longer describe all metrics as session usage.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Describe the bug
The /usage command help text says:
Display session usage metrics and statistics
However, the command output combines metrics with three different scopes:
Activity · last 180 days · N messagesis aggregated from local history across multiple saved CLI sessions.Changes,AI Credits,Tokens, and the per-model breakdown describe the current session.Plandescribes account/plan usage for the current quota period.
Calling all of this "session usage" is misleading. In a new session with only one user prompt, /usage can report hundreds of messages and show a six-month activity graph, making it appear that either the session boundary or message count is incorrect.
Affected version
GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.81-11
Steps to reproduce the behavior
- Use Copilot CLI across multiple sessions.
- Start a new session and send one prompt.
- Run
/usage. - Observe that the help describes session metrics, while the output includes a 180-day, multi-session message count and chart plus plan-period quota usage.
Representative output:
Activity · last 180 days · 861 messages
...
Changes +0 -0
AI Credits 2.72 (22h 1m 8s)
Tokens ↑ 23.3k (11.8k cached) • ↓ 179
gpt-5.6-sol ↑ 23.3k (11.8k cached) • ↓ 179
Plan ... 0% used • resets in 27 days
200 / 200,000 AIC
Expected behavior
The help text and documentation should make the scopes explicit. For example:
Display local activity history, current-session usage metrics, and plan quota usage
Ideally, the rendered output would also label each section's scope (for example, Local activity, Current session, and Plan period) so users do not have to infer it.
Additional context
- Operating system: Windows
- CPU architecture: x86_64
- Shell: PowerShell
- The current documentation describes
/usageas showing "session statistics," including current-session AI Credits, duration, code edits, and token usage. It does not explain that the command also includes local multi-session activity and account/plan-period quota information.
- Dominant language
- Shell
- Stars
- 11.2k
- Forks
- 1.9k
- Avg merge
- 14h 16m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 6
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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