Time Tracking for AI-Assisted Development

Feature Requests
1

Problem Statement

As a professional software engineer using Cursor AI IDE, I need a way to accurately track and report time spent on AI-assisted development tasks. Currently, there’s no built-in mechanism to track time spent in chat and composer sessions, making it challenging to:

  • Invoice clients accurately for AI-assisted development work
  • Maintain transparency with clients about time allocation
  • Optimize personal productivity and development workflows

Proposed Solution

Implement an intelligent time tracking system for Cursor AI’s chat and composer features that includes:

Core Functionality

  1. Automatic Timer

    • Starts automatically when opening a new chat or composer instance
    • Tracks total time spent in each session
    • Displays running timer in the UI

  2. Thread-Level Timestamps

    • Records timestamps for every interaction (prompts, responses, code implementations)
    • Maintains a chronological history of the entire development session

  3. Smart Time Management

    • Ability to mark specific timestamps as checkpoints
    • Option to reset timer from any previous checkpoint
    • Differentiate between active development time and idle time

Use Case Example

A typical workflow might look like:

  1. Start new chat (timer begins)
  2. Write prompt and receive response (1 minute)
  3. Take lunch break (1 hour)
  4. Return to work
  5. Select last response timestamp
  6. Reset timer to continue from the 1-minute mark

This ensures that the recorded development time accurately reflects actual work time (1 minute) rather than including the lunch break (1 hour and 1 minute).

Benefits

  1. Professional Services

    • Accurate client billing
    • Transparent time reporting
    • Better project cost estimation

  2. Productivity Analysis

    • Track efficiency of AI-assisted development
    • Identify patterns in development workflows
    • Optimize time management

  3. Team Management

    • Better resource allocation
    • Accurate project timeline estimation
    • Clear documentation of development time

Technical Considerations

  • Time data should be stored locally or with user account
  • Consider timezone handling for distributed teams
  • Implement export functionality for timesheet generation
  • Ensure minimal performance impact on the IDE

Priority Level

High - This feature would significantly improve the professional usability of Cursor AI IDE for commercial software development.

Would love to hear the community’s thoughts on this feature request and any additional suggestions for implementation details.

1 Like
2

Completely Agree and +1 on this !

3

Realisticly, why would you invoice like that though? If you are working on a project and along the way a different approach seems better, its just part of the process and are billable hours just as well.

Prior to AI the amount wasted was much higher if anything, sometimes i get done in a day what a team could not do in a month, so they get a lot more value as is already.

4

While we appreciate the use case here, my first take here is that this is somewhat niche, and would not be of use to 99% of our users.

There are likely already extensions available that can track projects, and you could likely spin up your own (with Cursor’s help!) to make it specific to your needs, but I would say it’s unlikely we will see this in the future as a core Cursor feature!

5

I was thinking this is possible, just making an extension specific for cursor and the chat/composer bar

6

Please implement time stamp for the prompts. It would be much easier to find the previous version of code I want to see. It is because, revert to checkpoint feature makes mistake and the reverted code is not the same as it was and unusable.