The original title is "Every engineering metric gets gamed. One of them structurally can't."

Short summary

The article argues every activity-based engineering metric (LOC, commits, velocity, DORA) can be gamed per Goodhart's Law, but introduces 'gravity' — a measure of whether other developers built on your surviving code — as structurally ungameable. Survival alone has a seam (self-churn resets line age), but gravity requires others to choose your work, which you cannot supply alone. The metric uses time-decayed git blame weighted by whether colleagues built on top of your lines.

• •Activity metrics (LOC, commits, velocity, DORA) are all gameable via Goodhart's Law
• •'Survival' measures if your code still exists at HEAD but can be gamed via self-churn resetting blame age
• •'Gravity' — others building on your surviving code — is structurally ungameable because you can't force colleagues to use your work

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.