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[ARTICLE · art-26693] src=dev.to ↗ pub= topic=developer-tools verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

Why I quit SaaS AI observability tools and built a local proxy instead

A developer built ccglass, a local loopback reverse proxy for coding agents, after finding that SaaS AI observability tools like Langfuse and Helicone do not work with native CLIs such as Claude Code and Codex. The proxy intercepts HTTPS calls directly, bypassing the HTTP_PROXY environment variable issue, and provides a dashboard showing token usage and cache hit rates.

read1 min publishedJun 14, 2026

I've been using Langfuse and Helicone for the last 6 months. They're great products. Their teams are sharp.

But they don't work for coding agents.

Tool Architecture Works for coding agents?
Langfuse SDK + async upload to SaaS ❌ Need to instrument the agent
Helicone HTTPS proxy via HTTP_PROXY ❌ CLIs ignore HTTP_PROXY
Datadog LLM Obs APM agent ❌ Same problem
ccglass
Local loopback reverse proxy ✅ Yes

The reason: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Kimi, etc. are native CLIs (Node, Rust, Go). They make HTTPS calls directly to the API endpoint. They do not respect HTTP_PROXY

environment variables.

So the standard observability play — "just point your SDK at our proxy" — doesn't work. The agent isn't using a library that knows to call your endpoint.

I needed something that would:

http://127.0.0.1

)I built it. It's called ccglass. It does those 5 things. Nothing else.

$ npm i -g ccglass
$ ccglass claude

The dashboard shows:

If you use a coding agent heavily, and you don't know which of your prompts are 4,000 tokens of accidental repetition, you're leaving money on the table.

The first time I saw my own cache hit rate (38% — meaning I was re-sending the same system prompt 38% of the time and not knowing it), I had a "wait, that's literally me paying for nothing" moment.

Try it once. The data is eye-opening.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/jianshuo/ccglass

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