Timely vs Ably
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Timely repositions Memory.app as the time tracker that understands AI-tool work.
The dominant theme is AI-aware activity capture. Memory.app — Timely's local capture agent — now distinguishes Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cowork, Codex, and Cursor Agents as discrete tools, pulls real window titles and URLs, and scrubs credentials from captured URLs before storage. Around that, Timely keeps grinding through platform work: inline project creation, OAuth auto-refresh, project audit logs, native changelog page, and integration manager improvements.
Timely is racing to be the time tracker that knows what AI tools you used and what you used them for. The Memory capture layer is being rebuilt assuming AI tools, agents, and chat sessions are first-class workstreams, not generic 'browser activity.' The platform updates underneath — audit logs, integration housekeeping, OAuth resilience — are keeping the enterprise surface presentable while the differentiation work happens in capture.
Expect support for more AI tools (Anthropic console, ChatGPT Desktop, Gemini, copilots inside IDEs) and richer project attribution heuristics that tie a conversation or branch to a billable project automatically. Privacy controls around AI activity capture are the natural next product question.
Ably pivots its developer surface toward AI agents as first-class consumers
Ably's developer surface has been visibly pivoting toward AI agents over the last six weeks. The CLI hit v1.0 with structured JSON output envelopes, hint fields for self-healing agents, and unified --force semantics. Two weeks later v1.1 added `ably init`, which installs the CLI plus Agent Skills bundles directly into Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code in one step. A new AI Transport SDK lands separately, with end-to-end tool-calling and React providers for the Vercel AI SDK.
Ably is building two integration stories in parallel — agents as CLI users (via Agent Skills) and agents as transport consumers (via the AI Transport SDK). Together they bracket the workflow: agents read live data through the SDK and operate Ably itself through the CLI. The traditional client-library stream (JS, Python, Laravel) continues at steady pace in the background, with LiveObjects formally graduating to GA on the protocol-6 update.
Expect the AI Transport SDK to add tool-call adapters for at least one more AI runtime beyond Vercel — most likely the OpenAI Agents SDK or Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK — and Agent Skills coverage to expand to additional AI clients (Cline, Aider, Continue). Watch for the LiveObjects API to surface inside the chat/AI surfaces.
See more alternatives to Timely →
See more alternatives to Ably →