Worktale is a CLI tool that reads your git history and turns it into a personal work journal. No cloud. No account. No code leaving your machine. Your git history already has the story. Worktale just tells it.
I've been writing software professionally for over twenty years. In that time I've shipped hundreds of features, fixed thousands of bugs, and mass-deleted entire modules at 1 AM with the quiet confidence of someone who knows the tests will catch it. (They usually did.)
But if you asked me what I built last March, I'd stare at you. Blank. Nothing. The work was real. The memory of it isn't.
That's the problem Worktale solves.
The Forgetting Tax
Every developer I know has the same gap. You spend months deep in a codebase--shipping, iterating, solving genuinely hard problems--and then someone asks you to write a self-review, update your resume, or explain what you've been doing for the last quarter. And you open your git log and try to reverse-engineer your own career from commit messages like "fix thing" and "wip."
It's absurd. We have perfect records of every line we changed, every file we touched, every branch we merged. The data is right there. But nobody looks at it. And nobody turns it into anything useful.
I got tired of that.
What Worktale Is
Worktale is a CLI tool that reads your git history and turns it into a personal work journal. No cloud. No account. No code leaving your machine. You install it, point it at a repo, and it gives you a structured record of everything you built.
npm install -g worktale
worktale init
worktale dash
Three commands. That's it.
It tracks your commits, calculates your coding streaks, breaks your work into daily summaries, and gives you an interactive dashboard in your terminal. You can generate digests of your day, browse your history by week, and actually see the shape of your work over time.
The whole thing runs on a local SQLite database. No telemetry. No analytics. No network requests. Your work stays yours.
Why Local-First
I've been burned enough times by tools that promise privacy and then quietly phone home. Or tools that work great until the company pivots, gets acquired, or decides your free tier is actually a premium feature now.
Worktale doesn't have that problem because there's no server. There's no account. There's nothing to pivot or deprecate. It's a binary on your machine that reads your git history and writes to a local database. That's the architecture. That's the privacy policy.
This isn't a philosophical stance dressed up as a feature. It's a practical decision. Developer activity data is sensitive. Your commit patterns reveal what you're working on, when you're working, and how you think. That data belongs to you. Not to a startup's analytics dashboard.
The Dashboard
The TUI dashboard is the thing I'm most proud of. It's a full React app running in your terminal via Ink. Three views: Overview, Daily Log, and History. You tab between them, navigate with keyboard shortcuts, and get a real-time picture of your development activity.
It shows your current streak, today's stats, your most active files, commit activity heatmaps, and daily breakdowns going back as far as your git history goes. If you've been working on a repo for three years, you'll get three years of data on first run.
No setup. No configuration. Just worktale dash.
Who This Is For
Worktale is for the developer who ships consistently but has nothing to show for it. The one who does great work and then can't articulate what that work was when it matters.
If you've ever:
- Blanked during a performance review
- Stared at a resume wondering what to put for the last year
- Forgotten the feature you shipped two months ago
- Wanted a simple record of what you actually built
This is for you.
It's also for anyone who wants to build better habits around reflection. Not in a productivity-guru, morning-routine kind of way. In a "let me spend 30 seconds seeing what I did today" kind of way. The nudge feature reminds you at end of day to check in. Optional, non-annoying, easily ignored.
The AI Part (Optional, Local)
Worktale can optionally generate daily digests using Ollama--a locally running AI engine. It reads your commit messages (just the messages, never your code) and produces a human-readable summary of your day.
The key word is "locally." No data goes to OpenAI, Anthropic, or anyone else. If you don't have Ollama installed, Worktale uses a template-based system that works without any AI at all. Zero network requests.
I built it this way because I wanted the feature without the trade-off. AI-powered summaries are genuinely useful. Sending your commit data to a third party is not.
Open Source, MIT Licensed
Worktale is fully open source under the MIT license. The code is on GitHub. You can read every line, fork it, modify it, or contribute to it.
I'm building this in the open because the tool only matters if developers trust it. And trust starts with transparency.
What's Next
Cloud publishing is on the roadmap--a way to optionally share your work journal publicly, like a developer portfolio that writes itself, not totally unlike my other project RemoteDevelopers, but the local-first core will always work standalone. Cloud will be additive, never required.
For now, the CLI is the product. Install it. Run it on your repos. See what you've actually been building.
npm install -g worktale
Your git history already has the story. Worktale just tells it.
Worktale is live on npm and GitHub
Website: worktale.org
Follow @worktaleapp for updates.
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