Overview

This section is about connecting your own AI agent (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex) to Hourdini over MCP. If you want the chat drawer that ships inside the web app, see the in-app assistant instead. The two are complementary: the drawer is for short, conversational checks; an external agent is for longer, more autonomous workflows.

Once you connect Hourdini to an AI assistant, you can do things like ask Claude:

Start a timer on the Acme dashboard project, "design review with Sarah".

Open a session on the Acme dashboard. Mark me as supervising while you run the test suite, then end the session when you're done.

How many billable hours did I do for Acme last month?

Draft an invoice for Acme covering March.

The assistant has an agent-friendly tool surface over the same data as the web app and CLI. It can read your data, start and stop timers, log time, draft and send invoices, and manage the supporting setup.

Pick your assistant

Each guide is a 2-minute setup: copy a snippet into a config file, restart the app, ask a question.

What the assistant can do

A connected assistant can:

• Track time. Start, stop, and inspect the running timer. Log manual entries.
• Run sessions. Open a session on a project, flip its beat between active and agent as the work shifts, and end the session to write a single billable entry. This is how a connected agent records work it did on its own. See Sessions.
• Read your work. Browse clients, projects, time entries.
• Manage setup. Create clients, projects, tasks, tags, and project budgets.
• Review overlaps. List and acknowledge same-client overlapping time entries.
• Draft and send invoices. Pull unbilled time, draft, send the PDF, mark as paid.
• Run analytics. Hours, billable amounts, period comparisons, utilization, unbilled totals.
• Handle notifications. Read and mark agent-channel notifications.
• Manage organizations. List orgs and members, respond to invites, invite members, change roles, and manage client grants when the token holder has permission.

If something can't be done from the assistant yet, the reason is always that it hasn't been built. We're aiming for full parity with the core web workflows.

What it can't do

A few things are deliberately not exposed to the assistant:

• Billing and security settings. These belong on a trusted device.
• Voiding invoices that have been sent. This requires you to confirm in the web app.
• Anything outside the org the connection is for. A connection scopes to one org. See Personal access tokens.

How it stays secure

The connection uses a Personal Access Token that you generate in the web app. The token is yours, scoped to one organization, and can be revoked from Settings → Tokens at any time. Revoking takes effect immediately; the assistant's next call returns "not authenticated".

If you're curious about the protocol, Hourdini speaks Model Context Protocol (MCP) over Streamable HTTP. You don't need to know the details to use it; the per-client guides walk you through every step.