Most freelancers and indie engineers do not track time. They reconstruct it.
Friday afternoon, invoice due, you open the timesheet and try to remember Tuesday. You scroll git history. You skim Slack. You guess which half-hour belonged to which client. That ritual feels like time tracking because it ends in a timesheet. It is not. It is reconstruction after the fact.
The buyer gap
A timer only works when you remember to start it, stop it, and switch it when the Slack ping from Client B interrupts Client A. Context switching is the job for anyone juggling a few active clients. The timer fails at the exact moment you are deep in the work.
So the week gets rebuilt later. Browser history. Calendar blocks. Commit timestamps. A note you half-wrote. People on HN and Reddit say the same thing in plain language: they forgot the timer again, the spreadsheet is guesswork, and they are sure they are leaving hours on the table.
That is the gap. You need a record of work you can defend. A start/stop clock is not that record if the clock was off for half the day.
Reconstructing is not tracking
Tracking means the evidence accumulates while you work. Reconstructing means you invent a plausible week from scraps after the work is gone.
Those are different jobs. Reconstruction rewards narrative skill. Tracking rewards nothing from you except doing the work you were going to do anyway.
When AI coding enters the picture, reconstruction gets worse. A Claude Code or Cursor session can move a feature while you are in a meeting. Git shows the commit. Your timer shows a blank. Your memory splits the difference and rounds up or down depending on how the client relationship feels that week.
How getScribe fills the gap
getScribe is a local-first work-evidence aggregator. It reads signals that already exist on your machine: git commits, file changes, and AI coding session logs from tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini, Codex, Copilot, and others. Each event lands as a dot on one timeline, colored by project.
You review the timeline. You do not rebuild Tuesday from memory.
Processing stays local (SQLite at ~/.scribe/scribe.db). getScribe does not record your screen, log keystrokes, or take screenshots. It reads the traces your tools already leave.
The same timeline shows up across Desktop, CLI (@scribe.cool/cli), and scribe:* skills. Three surfaces, one record of what happened.
What changes on Friday
Invoice day stops being archaeology. You open the week, see the evidence density on each project, and ship a report or invoice from activity that was captured as you worked.
That is tracking: evidence first, narrative second.
Join the waitlist
getScribe is in private beta. Join the waitlist. If you already have an invite path or want to skip the queue when Lifetime is offered, Lifetime at $199 is the paid bypass, not the front door.
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