Building a tiny Windows tray app with .NET 9 Native AOT and raw Win32

I built CreditMeter, a small Windows tray app that shows GitHub Copilot AI-credit usage like a taxi meter.

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Why I built it

Agentic coding makes AI usage feel invisible until you look at the bill.

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Constraints

• no WinForms

• no WPF

• no backend

• no telemetry

• no dependency-heavy architecture

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Tech stack

• C# / .NET 9
• Native AOT
• raw Win32 / PInvoke
• GitHub REST API
• DPAPI for local PAT storage

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What I learned

For tiny tools, architecture is also about knowing what not to add.

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Repo

https://github.com/cdilorenzo/CreditMeter