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Comparison · Infra & APIs

Timely vs Dust

Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.

T
Timely
INFRA · APIS
6.3

Timely repositions Memory.app as the time tracker that understands AI-tool work.

◆ Current state

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.

◆ Where it's heading

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.

◆ Prediction

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.

D
Dust
INFRA · APIS
8.8

Dust is widening the agent-platform surface: multimodal tools, enterprise audit, model breadth.

◆ Current state

Dust is shipping at a fast clip on three fronts that together define a serious agent platform: model breadth (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3, refreshed Anthropic lineup), agent capability (MCP tools can now return images the agent can actually see, plus context compaction for long runs), and enterprise readiness (workspace audit logs streamable to Datadog, Splunk, or any HTTPS sink). Integrations are getting versioned upgrades on the side (Asana MCP v2, Gmail labels and archive). The product is moving from 'chat with an agent' toward 'run agents in production with observability and multimodal I/O.'

◆ Where it's heading

Two clear directions: deeper enterprise GTM via SIEM-grade audit, and a more capable agent runtime that can see, remember, and act inside third-party SaaS. The MCP-image release in particular treats Model Context Protocol as a real I/O surface rather than a text-only RPC, which is where the broader MCP ecosystem is heading. Frequent model rotations suggest Dust is positioning as model-agnostic infrastructure rather than locking into one provider.

◆ Prediction

Next moves likely lean into the same arc: more MCP integrations with action verbs (write/delete/transition states), expanded multimodal returns (audio, structured documents), and finer-grained admin controls layered on top of the audit foundation - tool-usage policies, per-agent egress rules, or approval workflows.

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