Automatically track IDE activity to show where developer time is spent

Many engineering leaders, product managers, and finance teams currently lack objective, fine-grained data on where developer time is actually spent, relying instead on proxies like commit counts or ticket status that miss debugging, reviews, and non-coding work; this problem scales across an estimated 4 million development teams and contributes to misallocation of resources and uneven performance benchmarks. The visibility gap is especially acute for remote and distributed organizations that need cross-geography signals to plan and measure engineering ROI. You could build lightweight IDE plugins for VS Code and JetBrains that automatically capture anonymized activity (edits, builds, test runs, debug sessions, review interactions) and map those events to issues, branches, or epics via optional integrations with issue trackers and CI. On top of that, ML models would infer work categories and surface aggregated dashboards, alerts, and exportable reports while embedding strong privacy controls, sampling options, and per-developer opt-in flows to limit surveillance risk. Timing is favorable: the total obtainable market is roughly $12.0B (4M teams × $3,000 ACV) and the convergence of remote work, mature IDE extensibility, and advances in ML for code means the technical enablers and customer need are both strong (Market Score 90/100; Revenue Potential 88/100). Competition is medium, so early pilots and measurable ROI will determine whether a product can capture share. To stand out you’ll need to emphasize developer trust and experience—privacy-first defaults, transparent telemetry, minimal performance impact, and high-precision ML classification—plus turnkey integrations and benchmarking against industry baselines. The main challenges are adoption friction driven by privacy/legal concerns, potential perception as a surveillance tool, and the need to prove signal quality; securing pilot customers willing to validate ROI and iterate quickly is essential.