Let Your Coding Agents Clock Their Own Time with BurrowTime

When I first wrote about BurrowTime, the goal was to keep my Watson workflow and years of time-tracking history while moving to a Go binary. The latest release adds another use for it: letting my coding agents clock the work I ask them to do.

BurrowTime 0.2.0 gives agents their own tracking sessions. I can attach time tracking to a task, let the agent handle the timer, and review the result in the same local reports I already use.

Ask for tracking in the task

The binary includes an optional skill for Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini, and OpenCode. For Codex, setup looks like this:

burrowtime skill install codex
burrowtime skill doctor codex

Then include the project and task when asking the agent to work:

Track this work in BurrowTime under "client portal" +PORTAL-42.

Installing the skill does not start tracking ordinary conversations. It waits for that explicit request and asks for a project or task if either is missing. Once tracking starts, the skill tells the agent to pause while waiting for required input, resume when work continues, and stop its session when it finishes.

A timer tied to the work

Each agent session has an exact ID, so an agent can stop the timer it started without grabbing whatever happens to be running. My own timer can keep going alongside it. Repeated start requests can use a retry key to return the existing session instead of creating another one.

Interrupted agents are handled with renewable time limits called leases. The agent renews its lease during long tasks. If it disappears, burrowtime agent recover closes the expired session at the lease deadline. I can also stop its timer manually; a later stop from the agent recognizes that it has already ended.

One history to review

Completed agent sessions become ordinary Watson-compatible time records. They appear in the normal logs and reports, and burrowtime agent report adds a view grouped by session and agent client. Concurrent timers each count their full duration, so overlapping agent work is recorded separately.

For agents that use MCP, burrowtime mcp exposes the same session controls and reporting tools. Direct commands can also pick up repository defaults from .burrowtime.toml.

BurrowTime still works as a terminal time tracker I can drive myself. This release lets the agent doing a task handle its timekeeping too, while the history stays local and available in the same place. The setup instructions are on GitHub.