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Onboard a developer

Use this guide to bring developers into capture. Developers are not invited like members; their work is captured the moment the AITrax tracker runs on their machine. You'll open the Onboarding page, send the workstation setup link, and point developers at the right path for their editor.

  • Deployment: SaaS, On-premises

The Onboarding page is titled Setup in the portal and is available to every role, so a manager who spots a developer with no captured activity can onboard them without involving an admin.

Before you begin​

To onboard developers, you need all of the following:

  • Access to the portal: The Onboarding page is in the sidebar for every role.
  • A way to reach your developers: You send them one link, so email or chat is enough.

You do not create developer accounts. Installing the tracker creates a developer identity automatically from the engineer's Git commit email and the editor or AI-tool account they work under. If one person commits under more than one email, their activity lands on separate identities; an administrator can link those identities at Settings > Developers so the activity is combined. See Members and developers.

The Onboarding page offers two paths. For onboarding a team, use the first:

  1. Open Onboarding (Setup) in the portal.
  2. Copy the workstation setup link under the Managers and Admins path.
  3. Send it to your developers. Each developer installs AITrax themselves from that one link.

This is the fastest way to onboard a team: send one link and let each developer run the setup for their own machine. Their in-editor and AI-assisted work starts flowing once setup completes.

Onboarding page

The Onboarding page: the Managers and Admins setup link, and the editor tabs a developer picks from.

2. Let each developer pick their editor​

The developer path has a tab for each supported editor: JetBrains IDEs, VS Code-based IDEs, Visual Studio, Eclipse IDEs, and Others. The developer picks their editor tab and follows the steps. For a developer on a supported IDE, that is the whole job. See Set up your workstation for the developer's own steps.

Cursor is a VS Code-based IDE and is covered by the VS Code-based tab, not by Others.

3. Use the Others path for developers not on a supported IDE​

Some developers do not work in a supported IDE, or work primarily through command-line AI agents such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, or Copilot CLI, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) clients such as Claude Desktop. For them, capture cannot attach to a repository's project configuration, so it is set up at the user level on the workstation.

This is the Others tab on the Onboarding page. Its own description states it plainly: use this setup command only when the developer does not use any supported IDE. It configures user-level CodeTogether AI settings for local development activity on that workstation.

Instead of writing capture config into a specific repository, the Others setup writes configuration into the developer's home directory: a per-user capture config and cache, plus user-level hooks and telemetry wiring for the AI tools they use. Without a repo checkout there is no project-level place to attach capture, so this setup captures those agent and CLI sessions and attributes them to the right person, including work that is not tied to any Git repository.

To run it:

  1. Open a terminal on the workstation.
  2. Choose the command for the operating system, a macOS or Linux shell command or the Windows PowerShell equivalent.
  3. Copy, paste, and run it. It runs the user-level setup.

For large fleets, the same user-level command can be pushed by a software-management system such as Intune, Jamf, GPO, or Ansible, so every machine is configured automatically without anyone opening a terminal. The command embeds a short-lived install token: store it as you would any other credential in your configuration-management system, and copy a fresh command from the Onboarding page for each rollout rather than reusing an old one.

4. Confirm the developer is capturing​

After setup, confirm capture reached the portal:

  1. Have the developer make a commit, or run an AI session.
  2. Open the developer roster on a work area's Activity tab and confirm the developer now appears with recent activity.

Activity does not appear instantly, because processing runs asynchronously. See No activity appears for a developer if a developer stays missing.

Troubleshooting​

A developer shows only part of their work​

AITrax has to be set up for each IDE a developer uses. Someone working in both VS Code and IntelliJ who completed only one setup shows only half their work. Confirm every editor they use is set up.

A CLI-only developer shows nothing​

Command-line agents and MCP clients are captured by the user-level Others setup, not by an IDE tab. Confirm the Others setup ran on that workstation.

If this doesn't fix it​

Contact support with all of the following. Tickets missing these take longer to resolve:

  • Which editors or AI tools the developer uses.
  • Whether the IDE tab setup or the Others user-level setup was run.
  • The developer's operating system and the commit or session you expected to see.
  • Your deployment kind and server version.