TaskTrace

Automatic project time tracking for VS Code & Cursor. TaskTrace records coding activity and editor presence, and shows today's time and earnings in your status bar. Connect Agent Bridge to capture supported agent sessions independently, including when you work outside the editor. Activity syncs to your TaskTrace dashboard.

Why TaskTrace

• Zero effort. No timer to start or stop — open your editor and code, and tracking begins on its own.
• Time & earnings in your status bar — e.g. 1 hr 50 mins • $27.50, with a per‑project breakdown on hover. Click it to open your dashboard.
• Smart project detection. Each project is recognized automatically — even when one folder holds several apps, each is tracked on its own.
• Editor presence. Project time can include directing an agent in a chat panel, terminal work, and reading with recent input. The editor must have focus; native idle sampling fills gaps from sandboxed webviews such as Codex. Presence reads only time since the last input, never keys or prompts. Its 15-minute evidence limit applies to presence; observed file edits and independent agent events are separate.
• Independent agent tracking. Agent Bridge has its own connection, supported provider hooks, background sync and queue. Its status shows configured providers, the last captured event and the last successful sync. Editor presence by itself does not identify Codex or Copilot.
• تقدير بصمة الكتابة. TaskTrace estimates hand-typed work versus bulk/generated insertions from editor events. It is a useful signal, not proof of authorship: pastes, snippets, formatters, and editor behavior can affect the estimate.
• Private by design. Your source code never leaves your machine — only relative file paths are sent. Your API key lives in your OS keychain, and HTTPS is enforced.
• Reliable. Activity is fsynced to a durable append-only JSONL queue and survives editor restarts. Invalid 422 payloads are isolated as dead letters, while rate limits and transient failures retry safely.

Getting started

1. Install TaskTrace from the Marketplace.
2. Open the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P) and run TaskTrace: Connect — or just click TaskTrace in the status bar.
3. Approve in the browser. The page names the editor it will send the approval to — check that it's the one you started from. Your editor is connected the moment you approve; the token is delivered straight back and stored in your OS keychain. Nothing to copy, nothing to paste.
4. Start coding. Your status bar shows today's time within a minute.

No browser on this machine? Create an API key in your dashboard (الإعدادات ← مفاتيح API) and run TaskTrace: Set API Key instead. Keys you already use keep working.

Track Codex and Copilot with Agent Bridge

1. Open Tracking Health, download the Agent Bridge build for your computer and follow its installation instructions. The extension never silently downloads or runs an installer.
2. Run TaskTrace: Set Up Agent Tracking. If the executable is installed outside standard locations, select it or set tasktrace.agentBridge.path in your user settings. The extension does not launch binaries from an opened workspace.
3. Approve the Agent Bridge connection in your browser using the same TaskTrace account. Setup installs the supported provider hooks and starts its background sync service. The extension connection and Bridge connection are separate.
4. Run a supported agent workflow, then open TaskTrace: Show Agent Bridge Status. Confirm a captured event and a successful sync; check the dashboard for server receipt. Installed hooks alone are not proof of capture. Supported provider versions and hook limitations are listed on Tracking Health.

Click the Agent Bridge status item to connect, set up hooks, sync queued events, restart background sync, or open the installation guide. TaskTrace: Show Diagnostics includes both editor and Bridge health while clearly distinguishing them. To manage the local Bridge from a remote development session, open a local editor window.

The editor's bulk-insertion estimate remains approximate: a paste or snippet can look generated, and a short completion can look typed. Streamed bursts are evaluated as a group, and saving an unchanged generated insertion preserves its estimate. Assistant identity, sessions and delivery status come from supported Bridge events.

Private by design

• Only file paths relative to your project are sent — never your code, never absolute paths.
• Your API key is kept in the OS keychain, never in a settings file.
• Connecting uses PKCE (RFC 7636, S256): this editor keeps a one-time secret in memory and sends only its hash to the browser, so the approval that travels back through your browser cannot be redeemed by anyone but this editor. The secret is never logged, displayed, or written to disk.
• Secret files (.env, private keys) and dependency folders are never tracked.
• HTTPS is enforced for any non‑local server.
• Git remotes and commit ids are never sent raw. TaskTrace normalizes remotes after removing credentials and sends only account-keyed HMAC-SHA-256 fingerprints, plus a short repository display label.

For a privacy-safe operational report, run TaskTrace: Show Diagnostics. It shows editor queue age and flush state, the latest heartbeat source and abbreviated fingerprints, presence evidence, and a separate Bridge health summary. It contains no API keys, source content, absolute paths, prompts, key/button data, or raw idle-time samples. A smaller editor queue-only health snapshot is sent best-effort to supported TaskTrace backends; Bridge reports its own delivery health.

Works automatically in both VS Code and Cursor.

TaskTrace · tasktrace.app