Show HN: Wasted Cycles – Local wall-clock profiler for AI coding agents
Wasted Cycles is a local wall‑clock profiler that measures how much time AI coding agents spend blocked on external compute resources such as compilers, tests, CI, and containers. The tool runs without installation, accounts, or network uploads, reading existing trace files on the machine and presenting a breakdown of agent work versus blocked time. It supports multiple trace formats, classifies segments into working, blocked, and non‑counted categories, and highlights the highest‑impact bottlenecks for developers to address.
- ▪A wasted cycle is defined as any time the coding agent is waiting on compute it does not control, such as compiling or running tests.
- ▪The profiler operates entirely locally, downloading a verified binary, processing traces, and deleting the binary on exit with no data sent externally.
- ▪It categorizes elapsed segments into agent working, blocked on compute, and not counted (human waiting), and reports throughput as the share of non‑blocked agent time.
- ▪Supported trace sources include local harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, and Grok, while traces lacking per‑event timestamps are skipped or marked with low confidence.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Github |
| Canonical URL | https://zozo123.github.io/wasted-cycles/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:47:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T15:48:26.475Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T15:48:26.475Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | mzIOz9eRXxju · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Local wall-clock profiler WASTED CYCLES Find the machines your coding agent is waiting on. A wasted cycle is time your agent spends blocked on compute it does not control — compiling, running tests, waiting on CI, provisioning containers, fetching packages, joining sub-agents. Wasted Cycles reads the traces already on your machine and shows how much of a run was that, and which machine to fix first. Time spent waiting on a person is not a wasted cycle: it is reported separately and never enters the metric. Copy $ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zozo123/wasted-cycles/main/run | sh No install, no account, no daemon, no API key, no upload. The runner downloads a checksum-verified binary into a temporary directory, runs it, and deletes it on exit.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.
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