trace-file-lineage Answers 'Which Agent Made This File' and Ships a Grade for 'I Don't Know'
uczltw6/trace-file-lineage took 172 stars in three days after a 2026-07-29 launch, solving a problem that only exists because agents now write files unattended. It ranks candidate producers from static parsing of Python and notebooks, file metadata and timestamps, git rename history, document structure for PDF/Office/EPUB, image EXIF, and optional shell command recording. The design point worth copying is the confidence ladder: verified means proof from a recorded run, then strong-candidate down to weak-signal, and insufficient when the evidence genuinely is not there rather than a plausible guess. Benchmarks on macOS with Python 3.14 report 0.5s first scan and 0.1s cached at 1,000 files, 16.5s and 1.1s at 10,000. Install is 'pip install trace-file-lineage'; CI covers twelve Python 3.11 to 3.14 and OS combinations.
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