Every developer I know now runs an AI coding agent in something like auto-accept mode. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor: you give it a task, it runs commands, edits files, installs packages, and you review... the diff, maybe. The commands? The installs? The thing it did in that folder outside the repo? Nobody looks. The activity scrolls off the terminal and is gone.
That asymmetry bothered me. We built an entire industry around audit trails for humans (git blame, CI logs, access logs), then handed the keyboard to agents and kept none for them.
So I built Tracon: a local flight recorder for AI coding agents. The name is the FAA's term for Terminal Radar Approach Control, the radar room that tracks every aircraft in an airspace. This one tracks every agent on your machine.
Tracon is a Mac and Windows desktop app (Tauri 2, Rust core, React UI, SQLite store) that sits in the tray and records what your agents do:
Capture is deliberately passive. Hooks give real time events over localhost; transcript tailing (filesystem notify, read only) covers everything else, so CLI sessions show up live even with zero setup. A dead or closed Tracon never slows an agent down. Everything stays on your machine: no telemetry, no accounts, AGPL.
Here is the part I find genuinely funny: Tracon was largely written by Claude Code, with me directing, reviewing, and vetoing. And because Tracon tails Claude Code transcripts, it recorded its own construction.
At one point the agent ran rm -rf node_modules to fix a dependency issue. Tracon, half built, flagged it: recursive delete, red pill, straight into the flag inbox. The first real data on the Live page was the session that was building the Live page. When I later ran an eight angle automated review before the v0.2.0 release, the review agents found a bug where the live board picked a session's working directory by lexicographic MAX instead of most recent. The commit fixing it is in the history, next to the EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN output proving the query it optimized.
I decided to say all of this out loud in the README instead of hiding it, for one simple reason: an auditor you cannot audit is spyware. A tool whose pitch is "you should be able to review what agents do" cannot be shy about having been written by one. The transparency is the trust model.
The vibe coding meme undersells how much human judgment this took. A few honest notes from the log:
If you want to see what agent written, human directed, machine audited software looks like, the repo is the receipt. Installers for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows are on the releases page. Run any Claude Code or Codex session and it appears in the timeline within seconds; add the hooks for real time capture.
[https://github.com/mukes555/tracon](https://github.com/mukes555/tracon)
If your agents are doing something Tracon should flag and does not, that is exactly the issue I want filed.