I Made My AI Agent Track Its Own Costs Per Task — Here's What I Learned

The $42 Kanban Board This week I built a kanban board. Nothing special — Express server, React frontend, WebSocket for real-time updates. The twist? It's operated by an AI agent, and every completed task shows exactly what it cost in API tokens. 26 tasks. $42.24 total. And the distribution is fascinating. The Setup ClawKanban is a task board that lives inside an AI-powered workflow. An autonomous agent picks up tasks, works them, and moves them to done. Standard kanban stuff — except the agent is the developer. The board itself was built this way. The agent wrote the server. The agent wrote the React UI. The agent debugged its own WebSocket issues. And now, every task card shows a purple cost badge telling you exactly what it cost to complete. 💲 $0.10 — Add a connection LED indicator 💰 $1.82 — Implement task archiving with date ranges 💰💰 $3.57 — Build human-readable task identifiers 💰💰💰 $11.46 — Add cost-per-task tracking (yes, this feature tracked itself) Why Cost-Per-Task Matters If