How do you track development time?

Question

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?

thisdougb · Accepted Answer

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.