Show HN: Predictive load balancing for Claude accounts

Developer Yasyf released cc-pool, a macOS tool that predictively load-balances Claude Code sessions across multiple Claude Max/Pro subscriptions by selecting the account with the most remaining usage headroom before each session starts. The tool installs via Homebrew, wraps the `claude` command, and stores secrets in the macOS Keychain, ensuring no proxy or manual switching is needed.

Predictive, start-of-session load-balancing across multiple Claude subscriptions — for macOS. Run several Claude Max/Pro subscriptions and you hit the same wall every week: one account pegged at its 5-hour or weekly limit while another sits idle. cc-pool launches every Claude Code session on the emptiest account, picked from live 5-hour / 7-day usage before the session starts — predictive, not reactive. No proxy in the request path, no manual switching, no waiting for a rate-limit error to learn you picked wrong. After setup, claude is an alias for ccp run and the pooling disappears into the background. Two hard guarantees underwrite the design: plain claude on ~/.claude keeps working untouched — the pool can never log it out — and secrets stay in the macOS Keychain, never in cc-pool's database. How it works how-it-works has the details. brew tap yasyf/cc-pool https://github.com/yasyf/cc-pool brew install yasyf/cc-pool/cc-pool macOS only. The binary installs as cc-pool with a ccp symlink; the default build is pure Go. Pool two subscriptions and launch Claude on the emptiest one, in about five minutes. 1. Run ccp. On an empty pool it walks you through logging in each subscription — every account gets its own claude /login : bash $ ccp ✓ Set up cc-pool on this machine. How do you want to log in? Log in now, in this terminal claude opens its /login flow right here; finish it and ccp closes claude for you Name for this account optional work@example.com ✓ Added work@example.com. Add another account? Yes the second login runs the same way ✓ Added personal@example.com. Your pool now has 2 accounts. Launch Claude on the emptiest account: ccp run Wrap claude to always launch on the emptiest account? Yes ✓ Wrapped claude — added an alias to ~/.zshrc. Restart your shell or run source ~/.zshrc to use it now. Run command claude for plain ~/.claude. 2. Check the pool. ccp status --plain prints the table once; bare ccp status or bare ccp , now that accounts exist opens a live TUI with per-account score breakdowns: bash $ ccp status --plain ACCOUNT SCORE 5h used 7d used LIVE RESETS ▸ work@example.com 68.1 22% 46% 0 6:00 PM personal@example.com 34.8 61% 70% 0 4:30 PM ▸ = next pick · score higher = emptier · 5h/7d = % used updated 3:58 PM 3. Launch. Run claude now wrapped . It announces its pick on stderr, then execs the real claude — cc-pool is gone from the process tree before Claude Code draws its first frame: bash $ claude Selected work@example.com · 5h 22% used · 7d 46% used The Selected line names the account marked ▸ in step 2 — that match is your verification. From here on, every claude lands on whichever account has the most headroom. The quickstart wraps claude with alias claude='ccp run' . command claude bypasses it — plain claude on ~/.claude , one keystroke away. Prefer to leave claude untouched? Decline the prompt or pass ccp add --no-alias and pick your own name: alias cl='ccp run' ccp run forwards every argument to claude verbatim — no -- separator needed. Bare ccp with flags is shorthand for the same thing: ccp run --resume ccp -p "summarize this repo" auto-converts to ccp run -p ... CCP ACCOUNT=2 ccp run forces account 2 instead of auto-selecting. Repeated launches from the same directory stick to one account for prompt-cache continuity; those announce Reusing work@example.com pinned instead of Selected . Selection refuses to burn a nearly-reset window: an account with an exhausted plan window is never picked while any account has headroom, and ccp select --wait blocks until one does. If the whole pool is exhausted, the launch falls back to the least-bad account and warns loudly on stderr — that session bills pay-as-you-go credits if extra usage is enabled, or rate-limits until the window resets. ccp select prints the chosen config dir on stdout and nothing else. Set the plugin root too, so the session writes canonical plugin paths into the shared ~/.claude/plugins ccp run and ccp env both do this for you : CLAUDE CODE PLUGIN CACHE DIR="$HOME/.claude/plugins" CLAUDE CONFIG DIR=$ ccp select claude ~/.claude is never moved and never registered as a pool account. It stays the canonical config dir, so plain claude keeps working exactly as before, and is the shared base every pooled account mirrors. The pool never touches plain claude's credential or login identity. Every account, including your main subscription, joins with its own claude /login , so its token chain is fully independent of plain claude's. Claude Code namespaces its Keychain credential per config dir : the default ~/.claude uses the item Claude Code-credentials ; a custom CLAUDE CONFIG DIR gets a suffixed item Claude Code-credentials-<hash . cc-pool gives each account a real, unique dir ~/.cc-pool/accounts/acct-NN so each gets its own Keychain item, its own independent OAuth grant its own refresh-token chain , and runs on its own subscription — never API billing. Each account dir is seeded with a copy of your ~/.claude.json with the identity stripped the account's own login writes its identity , so pooled sessions inherit your settings, MCP servers, and per-project tool approvals instead of running first-run onboarding. Each account dir presents all of ~/.claude — projects/ , skills/ , plans/ , settings.json , history.jsonl , the lot — with writes passing straight back, so every session shares the same workspace and plan-mode plans persist across pooled sessions. Two providers: symlink default, zero-dependency : symlinks each top-level entry of ~/.claude into the account dir. New top-level entries are picked up automatically at launch, by the daemon, and by ccp doctor --fix . fuse optional, live mirror : a passthrough mirror mounted via fuse-t https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t — kext-less, mounted as you, no root — and hosted by a detached cc-pool mount-holder process, so daemon restarts and upgrades never disturb live sessions' mounts. Requires a -tags fuse build cgo and a one-time Network Volumes privacy grant. A few entries stay per-account instead of shared: daemon/ and ide/ Claude's PID-keyed supervisor and IDE lock/socket files, which would collide across concurrent sessions , backups/ rotating backups of each account's .claude.json , the identity and credential files .claude.json and .credentials.json , .last-update-result.json instance-local auto-update state , and remote-settings.json claude's cached per-subscription settings . Per-account .claude.json doesn't mean settings fork, though: its shareable top-level keys — everything except identity, per-project state, and startup counters — flow from ~/.claude.json into pooled sessions, so a setting you change in vanilla claude reaches every account. One caveat: under the default symlink overlay the flow is one-way merged in at launch, base wins , so changing a shareable setting inside a pooled session reverts at the next launch — manage shared settings in vanilla claude , or use the fuse overlay, whose live merged view writes shareable changes back to ~/.claude.json two-way . The baseline — exact when windows are far from a reset — is: score = 0.70· 100−util 5h + 0.25· 100−util 7d − 2·active sessions − 100·rate limited − 20·stale or refresh failed Three terms keep the ranking honest near the edges: an imminent reset earns credit in proportion to how soon the window resets a 90%-used window resetting in 10 minutes ranks up , not down ; a low-headroom barrier stops a nearly-exhausted 7-day window from being masked by 5-hour headroom; and a burn-rate term downranks an account being actively drained. select picks argmax. Usage comes from Claude's own /api/oauth/usage endpoint. brew services start cc-pool Homebrew installs or ccp service install source builds runs a user LaunchAgent — a root daemon couldn't read your login Keychain. It polls usage every ~3 min with exponential backoff, refreshes idle accounts' tokens before they expire a checked-out session owns its own refresh; the daemon adopts whatever token it rotated to on check-in , caches scores, and — with the fuse overlay — supervises the detached mount holder, which owns the mounts so daemon restarts and upgrades never disturb them . ccp add and ccp init start it automatically; if it isn't running, ccp select auto-spawns it or samples live. No secrets are ever stored in cc-pool's database — the macOS Keychain is the only secret store. These two tables cover the full user-facing surface; ccp help <command prints the same per command. | Command | What it does | |---|---| ccp | On a terminal — empty pool: guided onboarding; populated pool: status. With flags: shorthand for ccp run | ccp add | Pool a subscription via its own claude /login auto-inits the pool, starts the daemon | ccp run claude args… | Select the emptiest account and exec claude , forwarding every arg | ccp status | Per-account usage, score, and sessions — TUI on a terminal, plain table when piped | ccp select | Print the chosen account's config dir on stdout — the composable hot path | ccp env | Print shell export lines to launch an account by hand | ccp list | Static account list: ids, paths, Keychain items | ccp doctor | Check accounts' Keychain items and overlays; repair drift | ccp remove <id | Remove an account from the pool | ccp rename <id <name | Rename an account; --auto derives names from account emails | ccp init | Set up the pool and start the daemon optional — ccp add does this | ccp service install|uninstall|status | Manage the daemon and mount holder delegates to brew services on Homebrew installs | ccp widget | Install the Notification Center status widget Homebrew cask and show how to enable it | Flags, by command: | Command | Flag | Effect | |---|---|---| add | --label <name | Name for the first account | add | --count <n | Add exactly N accounts, no continue prompt | add | --yes , -y | Add one account and log in right away | add | --run-login | Log in immediately instead of asking how | add | --no-alias | Don't add a claude shell alias | run | CCP ACCOUNT=<id env | Force a specific account instead of auto-selecting | select | --wait | Wait for an account with headroom instead of failing or using an exhausted one | select | --account <id | Force a specific account id | select | --no-daemon | Don't use the daemon; sample usage live | select | --fresh <dur | Reuse cached usage newer than this live mode | status | --plain | Print the plain table instead of the interactive TUI | status | --watch , -w | Refresh continuously plain mode | status | --live | Force live sampling even if the daemon is running | env | --account <id | Account id defaults to the best account | doctor | --fix | Attempt to repair detected drift | remove | --keep-credential | Keep the account's Keychain item | rename | --auto | Derive labels from account emails skips custom labels | rename | --force | With --auto , overwrite custom labels too | init | --no-service | Don't start the daemon now; ccp add starts it | service uninstall | --force | Skip the live-session gate sessions on unmounted dirs will break | service uninstall | --purge | Also remove all pool accounts and state; never touches ~/.claude | ccp service uninstall stop the daemon + mount holder, unmount fuse overlays refuses under live sessions; --force overrides ccp service uninstall --purge ...and remove all pool accounts/dirs/state brew uninstall cc-pool ~/.claude and its credential are never touched. Build with CGO ENABLED=0 go build ./cmd/cc-pool ; go test ./... passes with no network, Keychain, or daemon. The manual end-to-end test matrix lives in docs/VERIFICATION.md /yasyf/cc-pool/blob/main/docs/VERIFICATION.md , release history in CHANGELOG.md /yasyf/cc-pool/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md , and conventions in AGENTS.md /yasyf/cc-pool/blob/main/AGENTS.md . PolyForm-Noncommercial-1.0.0 © Yasyf Mohamedali — free for noncommercial use. See LICENSE /yasyf/cc-pool/blob/main/LICENSE or the license text online https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0 .