← THE INDEX · VULN RESEARCH
agent-time-ledger
Autonomous source-to-exploit research. One rule: nothing gets reported unless a deterministic test could reproduce it.
What it is
agent-time-ledger is a small local tool that helps an agent stop guessing how much time has passed. The binary is atl.
The gap it fills
Current-time tools already exist and are easy. The useful gap is elapsed time. An agent will say ten minutes passed because the conversation looks short, when two hours actually went by while commands, continuous integration jobs, renders, or external services were running.
A conversation is a poor clock. The number of messages exchanged has almost no relationship to wall time when most of the work happens inside a subprocess. An agent that misjudges this will misreport progress, misjudge whether something has hung, and give a person the wrong picture of where a long job stands.
atl measures from the runtime clock instead, and stores marks, sessions, staleness checks, and reports locally.
Deliberately out of scope
One local binary. No cloud service, no telemetry, no prompt capture, no hosted dashboard, no token or cost tracking, no natural-language date parsing, and no general observability platform.
The scope list is longer than the feature list on purpose. Every one of those additions would turn a tool that answers one question correctly into a platform that answers many questions vaguely, and would put prompt content somewhere it does not need to be.
Shape
Written in Go, distributed as a single binary. State lives in a plain JSON file plus an append-only event log under the user's home directory, with an environment variable to relocate it for tests or isolated runs. Nothing leaves the machine.