OrbitLens Ace → ace.orbitlens.io
A busy quarter is easy to stage. Code that's still there in two years isn't.
Pick any metric a team has ever used to judge people, and someone has quietly figured out how to move it without doing the underlying thing.
Lines of code rewarded typing, so people typed. Commit counts rewarded committing, so commits got smaller and more frequent. Velocity rewarded closed points, and points drifted upward until a "3" meant nothing. DORA measured how often you deploy, so teams shipped trivial changes just to move it. Even churn — the number the "code health" tools lean on — is something you can lower on purpose, which means you can manage the number instead of the mess underneath it.
None of that requires dishonest engineers. It's Goodhart's law doing what it always does. Every one of those numbers is a measure of activity, and activity is cheap to produce. Once you're paid for activity, the fastest way to get paid more is to produce more of it — not more of whatever the activity was supposed to be a sign of.
