whytime-style wall-clock profiler

Turn a command's wall clock into a readable breakdown of where the seconds went

Problem

A developer times a slow script and sees only 3.8s total, with no idea how much was DNS, network, fsync, child processes or pure CPU. Figuring it out means strace/perf archaeology, noisy output, and non-reproducible results across machines.

Solution

A small CLI that wraps the target command, collects process, file-system, network and timer events, then attributes wall-clock time into percentage buckets with human-readable lines like "47% blocked on host X" or "34% fsync in ~/.cache". The lines always add up to 100% and can be pasted straight into an issue or CI log.

Users

Backend and DevOps engineers chasing slow builds, deploys and CI pipelines; indie devs writing scripts

MVP

Wrap any command on Linux/macOS; attribute time across CPU, network, fsync, sleep and other; auto-normalize percentages to 100%; JSON output for CI; canned fix suggestions per category

Revenue

Open-source core plus paid team tier (CI integration, trend comparison, Slack reports) or one-time CLI/desktop license

Why now

Containers and multi-stage builds obscure where time goes, and more scripts are now LLM-generated; OS tracing primitives are mature enough for one person to ship a polished CLI in weeks