June 16, 2026
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Key takeaways:
- Your metrics are lying to you. Deployment frequency, cycle time, PR volume – AI inflates all of them without improving engineering quality.
- Goodhart’s Law is now unavoidable: gaming metrics used to require effort. With AI, it’s a side effect of normal tool use.
- Three metrics still hold up! If your dashboard isn’t built around these, rebuild it.
Most software engineering metrics were built on the assumption that human effort and output move roughly in proportion to each other. AI has shifted that belief.
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June 16, 2026
