AI-Tagged Time Entries: Know Which Hours Were AI-Assisted

Every agency billing hourly will eventually face this question: should AI-assisted hours bill the same as manual hours?

A developer uses Claude Code to fix a bug. Manually it’s two hours. With AI, forty minutes. Bill for the time or the value? No consensus yet. But you can’t have the conversation if you don’t know which hours involved AI in the first place.

Miru now tags that automatically.

---

How It Works

Every time entry in Miru has a source field — manual for the web app, cli for the CLI. What’s new is source_metadata: structured data about the tool that created the entry.

When a time entry comes through the CLI or MCP, it can include metadata automatically:

• Source: cli, mcp, or automation
• Tool: claude-code, codex, cursor, or whatever created it
• MCP server: The specific MCP server name, if applicable

Miru normalizes this and generates a human-readable label. “Claude Code via CLI.” “Github via MCP.” Manual entries show nothing extra. The labels appear as badges on each entry card. At a glance, you see which entries were AI-assisted.

---

Filtering and Reporting

Badges are nice. Reports are useful.

Filter time entries by source in the Time Entry Report. Show only CLI entries. Only MCP entries. Only manual. Compare the breakdown across a week, a month, or a project.

“What percentage of our Acme hours were AI-assisted this month?” Filter by project and source. Now you have a number instead of a guess.

“Which developers are using AI tools most effectively?” Filter by team member and source. Useful data for tooling investments.

“How is our AI usage trending?” Pull the source breakdown month over month. If AI-assisted entries grow from 10% to 40%, your billing model might need to evolve. Better to see that trend early.

---

Why This Matters for Agencies

Clients are starting to ask: “Are you using AI on my project? Am I paying the same rate for work that takes you a quarter of the time?” Fair questions. The honest answer for most agencies is “we don’t know.” Every hour looks the same in the invoice.

Miru changes that. Not by dictating how you should bill — that’s your call. But by giving you the data to make that decision transparently. The alternative is waiting until a client figures it out themselves. Better to get ahead of it.

---

Set It Up

If you’re already using the Miru CLI with Claude Code hooks or MCP integrations, the tagging is automatic. Entries created through those channels already include source metadata. Just look at your Time Tracking page — the badges are there.

If you’re using the CLI manually, you can pass source metadata with the --source and --tool flags. The data flows through to reports and filters immediately.

The future of billing is transparency. This is one small step toward it.