A client asking "did you use AI for this?" rarely means what it sounds like.
Keito, a billing platform built around AI-assisted agency work, put it plainly in a recent post: "Clients demand visibility into whether AI was used and what value it delivered." That's two different questions wearing one sentence.
The first one — did you use it — is rarely what they actually care about. Nobody refuses a chair because a machine cut the wood. What they're really asking, even when they don't phrase it that way, is closer to: can you show me the work happened, and was it worth what I'm paying?
A token count doesn't answer that. A client doesn't know what a token is, and an invoice line that says "4.5 hours" doesn't say whether those hours built the feature or re-read the same three files after a failed attempt.
What answers it is closer to a paper trail: hours that map to commits, commits that map to a shipped feature, on a timeline the client can open without pinging you for a status update. Not a transparency stunt — just evidence that survives a second look.
That's the part already built into Estela, the open-source tool we're building: a read-only panel, one per client, from the hours and cost it reconstructs locally from Claude Code and Codex session logs plus git. The client opens a link instead of asking you for an update.
If you bill clients for work an agent touched, what do you actually show them when they ask?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (0)