Worktale is a lightweight yet powerful tool that transforms your Git history into a personal work journal, giving you a new way to reflect on your coding journey. Unlike many productivity or tracking apps that demand accounts, cloud syncs, or telemetry, Worktale is designed with privacy and simplicity at its core. Everything happens locally, entirely on your machine. No hidden data collection, no external servers, and no compromises. At its heart is a local SQLite database that belongs solely to you. Your commits, your history, your insights—kept private and under your control.
Installation is straightforward. With a single command via npm, you can set up Worktale in seconds. Once installed, running worktale init kicks off the experience. From there, you’re greeted with a full interactive terminal dashboard that feels both familiar and refreshing. The dashboard isn’t just a static view—it’s dynamic, responsive, and designed to help you explore your work patterns. You’ll see streaks that highlight your consistency, heatmaps that visualize your activity across days and weeks, and detailed daily breakdowns that show exactly how your contributions stack up. It’s like having a fitness tracker for your coding life, but without the baggage of external monitoring.
One of the most compelling aspects of Worktale is how it handles your existing Git history. On the very first run, it analyzes your entire repository history, surfacing insights you may never have considered. That means you don’t start from zero—you immediately get a retrospective view of your past work, seeing patterns emerge from years of commits. It’s a way to rediscover your own development story, whether you’ve been coding for months or decades.
For those who want even deeper reflection, Worktale offers optional AI‑powered digests. These summaries are generated via local models running on Ollama, ensuring that no data ever leaves your machine. The AI can provide narrative insights into your work habits, highlight trends, and even suggest areas of improvement—all while respecting your privacy. This balance between advanced functionality and local‑first design makes Worktale stand out in a landscape crowded with tools that often trade convenience for control.
The philosophy behind Worktale is simple: empower developers to understand their own work without unnecessary friction. It’s open source, licensed under MIT, and built with transparency in mind. You can inspect the code, contribute improvements, or adapt it to your own needs. There are no hidden agendas, no upsells, and no locked features. Just a tool created to serve developers honestly.
