Ask HN: How do you track development time?

#1

Post by phil3k » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 11:19 AM UTC

I am a freelancer and used to time-track by app, but half my work is now prompting, reviewing, and waiting for AI agents. Does anyone have a system that captures that honestly, or are you all just eyeballing it?

Re: Ask HN: How do you track development time?

#2

Post by thisdougb » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 11:56 AM UTC

I track branch time, which is the most honest I've found. I don't trust any self-reporting (me included).

It's pretty simple, and gives a broad view of feature dev time. Whether using AI to code or not.

https://github.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks

Edit: there's no perfect way, but a broad start/stop gate of creating then merging a branch gives a reasonable idea of time taken. Then you can use AI to trawl through high time-cost features and see if there's ugly implementation lurking.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track development time?

#3

Post by phil3k » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

thisdougb wrote: post #2

I track branch time, which is the most honest I've found. I don't trust any self-reporting (me included). It's pretty simple, and gives a broad view of feature dev time. Whether using AI to code or not. https://github.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks Edit: there's no perfect way, but a broad start/stop gate of creating then merging a branch gives a reasonable idea of time taken. Then you can use AI to trawl through high…

I also considered that, but it'd require shortening the lifetime of a git branch to also capture interruptions across projects, meetings, etc. So the more you increase accuracy, the more tedious this gets.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track development time?

#4

Post by thisdougb » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

phil3k wrote: post #3

thisdougb wrote: post #2

I track branch time, which is the most honest I've found. I don't trust any self-reporting (me included). It's pretty simple, and gives a broad view of feature dev time. Whether using AI to code or not. https://github.com/thisdougb/git-time-hooks Edit: there's no perfect way, but a broad start/stop gate of creating then merging a branch gives a reasonable idea of time taken. Then you can use AI to trawl through high…

I also considered that, but it'd require shortening the lifetime of a git branch to also capture interruptions across projects, meetings, etc. So the more you increase accuracy, the more tedious this gets.

I just use a branch per feature or unit of work. The git hooks make the time measurement automatic.

  git checkout -b feature_a
  
  git checkout master
  git merge feature_a

probably about 10 seconds of effort, over the course of 1-3 days of coding time.