On Personal Data Tracking

I've encountered a problem at work where I spend a large percentage of my day reviewing code. There isn't a great way to say definitively "I spend hours reviewing the team's work" because what? I'm just gonna write down that I reviewed code for 3 hours? Who's gonna buy that?

So, using Lcaude Code's new modding plugin system, I built a tool for myself. It hooks up to bitbucket, pulls the PR's branch into a worktree for us, and displays the hunks so I can review the work. Importantly, through the mod hooks, I can tie a time tracking system to the mod, so I know specifically how long I spent reviewing a PR.

It was important to me that I actually use it, so one of my requirements was that I wanted to be able to ask questions about code and get sophisticated answers against my own backlog of work, experience, and notes. So when I escape focus back from the pane into the cc session it draws the previous 15 hunks into context for the model, so we share context and I can immediately ask questions and learn what code does. It's very, very nice ux.

And it does, in fact, turn out that I spend 3 hours a day doing code review. Maybe this can make me faster, who knows, it's very fun toying with the mod ecosystem. I can do a LOT of neat things with it.

A fun detail about this is my new data capture process. I'm learning things about my workflow here, which I may want for research purposes and learning, so I store these records into a local sqlite3 database. Realizing this, I thought maybe there were other useful things to track, so now I'm doing personal timekeeping and monitoring using a haiku model to annotate my day. I can then look back on my behavior and see what I did in detail, and have sonnet write up a weekly review for myself.

Borderline dystopian if I think about it. Better yet is I can feed email, chat messages, meeting minutes and timestamps into this in order to detail out who is pinging me, why, when, and how it effects project work.

I built my own panopticon. I'm, uhh, still not totally sure what to do about it, but if the NSA is doing it to me then why shouldn't I also have these records? It is my (company's) data after all!

Anyway, point is that it was easy to do this and I have a true personal reconnaisance system for myself. Pandora opened the box, I'm just taking a peek inside, I guess.