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.

▲ phil3k 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I also considered that, but it'd require shortening the lifetime of a git branch to also capture interruptions across projects, meetings, etc. So the more you increase accuracy, the more tedious this gets.

	▲	thisdougb 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I just use a branch per feature or unit of work. The git hooks make the time measurement automatic. `git checkout -b feature_a <do work> git checkout master git merge feature_a` probably about 10 seconds of effort, over the course of 1-3 days of coding time.