Twelve years of WakaTime - and why I just deleted my account
For about a decade, WakaTime quietly counted the hours I spent in my editor. This morning I exported all of it and deleted my account.
A caveat up front: the dashboard below shows 12 years of activity, but that’s only how long WakaTime was watching. I started coding full-time a good decade before that, just around the FTP-the-PHP-straight-to-prod era. Time-tracking just didn’t start logging until 2015.
How I got into it
I installed the WakaTime plugin in the early days, around 2015. I even met Alan, the author, one evening at a hackerspace in Kreuzberg whose name I’ve long since forgotten. I was genuinely curious how a plugin could track coding time reliably, and he walked me through it: heartbeats, timeouts, and a pile of heuristics that turn a stream of keystrokes into “you coded for 1h 46m.” I thought it was clever. It served me well for years.
The shape of the work changed
When Zed came out I switched over almost immediately. The WakaTime plugin took a few months to catch up, so there’s a gap with no data around that time. But by the time it landed, something bigger had shifted: a lot of people started exploring and using agentic coding, me included.
I typed less and direct, reviewed, and waited more. “How many hours did I sit in the editor” stopped meaning much for me. The metric and the work had quietly drifted apart.
Software should stay in its lane
What actually nudged me out was smaller and more about principle. At some point the plugin started picking up activity from my AI agents - Codex and Claude sessions - and I never opted into that.
There are config options for it, and I did turn it off; this isn’t a bug report, and I’m not pointing fingers. The part that bothered me is that it happened at all, without my consent. Agentic scraping just started.
I have a simple rule for tools I install: behave predictably and stay in your lane. The moment something starts doing surprising things - reaching into corners I never pointed it at - I either isolate it or get rid of it.
It’s the same instinct that has me running agents inside tightly sandboxed containers: each project in its own box, the agent able to read the current project and nothing else. One rogue agent can’t uninstall, delete, or wipe anything beyond its sandbox. (Short of some theoretical Docker host-escape zero-day - but that’s a different threat model)
So I did the consistent thing: exported everything (genuinely grateful that’s easy and complete) and deleted the account. Not as punishment - just housekeeping.
So, no more time tracking
I’m not keeping a coding-time tracker anymore - it just doesn’t fit the work. The hours no longer describe what the job actually is. Still, twelve years is twelve years, and I’m glad I kept the record.
Here it is, project names anonymized. Built from the raw export with a little script (written by agent) everything’s aggregated locally.
Below: an export of my WakaTime data — aggregated locally, project names anonymized.