Software we built for ourselves.

Since 2003 we have built web services, mobile apps and AI solutions for our clients — different projects, different clients, different timeframes. Where our hours go is how we scope the next estimate, how we look back on a sprint, and what stands behind an invoice. So we have always kept a work log, in small in-house tools we wrote ourselves and read together at the daily standup.

Then coding agents changed how we work. Agents now do a real share of the job, and none of it showed up in the log. Every tool we had assumed each hour would be typed in by a person.

The same shift gave us the time to fix that. With an agent doing the typing, we could finally build the things we had always postponed — the details, the polish, the parts we never had hours for. A rough version took three days; two weeks later the team was using it. What came out was not a stopgap. It was the work log we had wanted for years.

It felt good enough to hand to someone else, so we did. It is open source and self-hosted because a work log holds the most honest record of what a team did. That belongs on infrastructure you control, in a codebase you can read.

For the full story, read “What We Set Out to Solve with Spantail” on Medium.