Sustainable Q Chat

User story

I am a developer who is vibe coding with Q Chat, and I am worried that I am ruining the environment with all of my AI usage. I want a way to see the impact my vibes are having on the environment. Additionally I want ways that I can reduce and offset this impact I am having.

What it does

I have added a few new features to Q Chat

• /usage command now shows the cost (in dollars), energy usage, CO2, and water consumption used today
• /usage graph shows four graphs over the past month showing your average usages in each of these four fields
• /usage summarize this gives a humorous comparison of your usage to a something that is easier to picture like how many times this usage would charge your phone.
• /usage offset this gives suggestions to thing you could do today to offset the environmental costs of your AI usage
• /condense <enable/disable> this will condense your prompts to reduce the token count without losing meaning, which reduces the energy cost of running this query.

How we built it

All changes were extensions to the q-chat open source codebase

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I spent $4 worth of Amazon's money in prompting today!

What we learned

I learned that the impact of AI models on the environment is significant, but it is smaller than what I expected.

Built With

• claude
• crossterm
• ratatui
• rust
• sqlite
• tokio