AstrolinksDevelopers don't hate time tracking because it's hard. They hate it because it interrupts the one thing they're paid for: long stretches of focus. Time tracking for developers should stay out of the way during the work and show up only at the end. That's what Astrolinks does.
Where a developer's day actually goes
You sit down to fix one bug. Two hours later you have read four Stack Overflow threads, reviewed a teammate's pull request, sat through a standup, answered three Slack questions and, yes, fixed the bug.
If you bill by the hour, or a client wants a daily note, you now have to explain all of that. Timers don't help much. You forget to switch them when you jump from the client's repo to a quick favor for another client. Then you guess.
Contractors have it worst. Two or three clients, each with their own Jira, their own Slack, their own idea of what an update looks like.
How Astrolinks fits a developer's workflow
Nothing to start, nothing to switch
Astrolinks is a small desktop app for Mac that opens as one window with a sidebar and keeps counting from the menu bar. While it runs it notes which app and window are in front every 5 seconds. On a Mac, in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium, Arc and Safari, it also notes the page address, without anything after "?" or "#". It never records keystrokes, screenshots or your clipboard.
Your editor's window title usually has the project folder in it. So does your terminal. Your browser shows the GitHub repo or the Jira ticket. Give each client a rule based on that: a repo name, a domain like acme.atlassian.net, or a word in the title. Today's log then files each stretch of work under the right client.
A daily update in a minute
Press Summarize my day at the end. You get a tab per client with what you worked on and for how long, plus any quick notes. Notes are the trick for developers. Press ⌃⌥N, type "blocked: staging DB is down", and it goes under Blockers. Type "tomorrow: write tests for the refund flow" and it goes under Tomorrow.
Send it to the client's Slack channel, open an email draft, or copy it into their tracker. The end-of-day reports feature explains the options.
The detailed breakdown, if you want it
Developers tend to like numbers about their own focus. The detailed breakdown, part of Pro and the trial, is off until you turn it on. When it's on, it shows your day item by item: each file, ticket, page and meeting, with its time. It marks focus blocks (25 minutes or more on one thing), interruptions, and switches per hour.
It also estimates "hands-on" against "reading" time, from how long ago you last touched the keyboard or mouse. Never which keys or how many. Hands-on and reading never go into a report, to AI or to a team. See the detailed breakdown page for exactly what it adds.
An example day
This is an illustrative example, not a real customer.
Priya is a contract developer. Mornings go to a fintech client on a React Native app. Afternoons go to a small agency's Shopify builds.
Her rules: anything with "ledger-app" in the title, and fintech.atlassian.net, belong to the fintech client. Anything with "shopify" or the agency's Slack belongs to the agency.
At 11:20 she gets pulled into a production issue for the agency. She doesn't touch a timer. The log files it correctly because the agency's Slack and the Shopify admin are in front. At 17:30 she presses Summarize my day. The fintech report lists two tickets and a code review. The agency report lists the hotfix and a blocker she noted. She sends one to Slack and copies the other into the agency's Basecamp.
Privacy, in a developer's terms
The log is a set of plain files on your computer: ~/Library/Application Support/Astrolinks/ on a Mac. We never receive it. There's no analytics in the app and no crash reporting. Your Anthropic key and Slack links are encrypted on your computer.
If you use Write with AI, Claude gets a summary of that client's day, never the log. Web addresses are cut to the site's name. Emails and phone numbers are masked. What Claude sees shows the exact text before you send it. Mark a client Private and nothing about it goes to AI.
Keep reading
- Daily standup vs. EOD report: when each one makes sense
- How to track time across multiple clients
- Privacy-friendly time tracking: what to look for
- Building for clients with a designer? See Astrolinks for designers