Technology Radar
Agent Trace is an open specification proposed by Cursor looking to standardize AI code attribution. As adoption of coding agents increases, understanding who has modified code now extends beyond human developers to include AI-generated changes. We're seeing early interest from teams that need better traceability around these changes. Existing tools such as git blame can show a line of code has been modified, but fail to capture whether that change was made by a human, an AI or both. Agent Trace takes a vendor-neutral approach to defining how code changes are traced and is unopinionated about how those traces are stored. It’s compatible with multiple version control systems, including Git, Mercurial and Jujutsu. The specification defines contributor types such as human, AI, mixed and unknown, along with a trace record describing the origin of each contribution. There are early signals of adoption, with support from tools such as Cline and OpenCode as well as implementations like Git AI. Teams adopting coding agents should assess tooling that implements the Agent Trace specification to improve code attribution.
