What Happened to My Project in the Last 4 Hours? (A Dev Tool Story)

#productivity #tooling #programming #showdev

Picture this: you have been coding for four hours straight. Three AI tools are open. Your terminal is running scripts. Your editor has unsaved changes. You step away for coffee.

When you come back, something is broken. A file has different content than you expected. Another file is missing entirely.

What happened? You have no idea.

Git shows nothing useful — you haven't committed in hours
Your editor's undo history is long gone
The AI tools have no memory of what they changed

This is the reality of modern development. Multiple tools touch your files. Things change fast. And when something goes wrong, you are left reconstructing history from nothing.

CodeFootprint

CodeFootprint is a Mac app that gives you that history automatically.

Select a folder. It records every change to your text and code files in real time:

Full diffs for every edit
Deleted files preserved with their content
Exact timestamps for everything
All stored locally on your machine

The Export Feature

Here is where it gets interesting for AI tool users. You can export your change history as a structured trace file and hand it to your next AI tool.

Instead of: "I think something broke around 2pm, maybe in the config file?"

You get: "Here is every change that happened in the last 4 hours. The config file was modified at 2:17pm by an AI tool. Here is exactly what changed."

That is the difference between guessing and knowing.