Engineering Performance Should Be Visible

The Problem

If you’re building a company, engineering drag is existential.

Not theoretical. Existential.

• The early team ships fast.
• Everyone is aligned.
• Everyone is accountable.

Then you hire more people.

• Output becomes harder to see.
• “Impact” becomes narrative.
• Underperformance hides inside complexity.
• Politics creeps in quietly.

You don’t notice the drift until velocity slows, and by then, it’s expensive. Most companies don’t fail because of bad ideas. They fail because performance density erodes over time.

Our Solution

We built an open source contribution signal that makes engineering output visible. It analyzes GitHub activity over rolling windows and surfaces:

• Who ships.
• Who reviews.
• Who keeps merge cycles tight.
• Who doesn’t.

PR authorship is weighted ~5x reviews, because shipping matters more than commentary.

Merge timing influences scoring because:

• Smaller PRs reduce risk.
• Faster merges maintain momentum.
• Long-lived branches create hidden cost.

The formula is public. The output is visible. No manager-only dashboards. If incentives exist, they should be explicit.

Why It Works

Founders intuitively know who their top performers are. This tool makes that intuition measurable.

When engineers can see contribution patterns:

• PRs get smaller.
• Reviews increase.
• Merge cycles tighten.
• The upper-middle improves.
• Chronic low output becomes visible within 30–90 days.

High performers don’t resent visibility. They expect it. The only people threatened by transparent output are those relying on ambiguity.

This tool doesn’t create competition. It reveals it.

How To Use It (And When Not To)

Use this if:

• You want to preserve early-team intensity as you scale.
• You care about throughput.
• You want disengagement visible quickly.
• You prefer clarity over politics.
• You believe performance density matters.

Do not use this if:

• You are comfortable carrying low-output contributors.
• You want managers mediating reality.
• You believe performance should remain private.
• Your culture avoids hard conversations.

This tool does not replace leadership. It amplifies it. If your technical leadership is strong, this sharpens execution. If it’s weak, this exposes that too. Companies drift toward bureaucracy unless actively resisted. This is one way to resist it.

If that resonates, use it.

If it doesn’t, you’re optimizing for something else.