assay · category

Thought leadership

Articles filed under Thought leadership.

These are engineering notes from operating the system — written while we run it, not to market it. When a piece here reads well, it is because the thing it describes actually happened, not because it was written to sell.

Thought leadership2026-09-09

A productivity number you can actually check

Commits, merges, and pull requests a day measure motion, not whether the work was any good. AssayScore is our answer: one delivery number built from four things an agentic pipeline already produces, published with the formula and the parts so anyone who doubts it can rerun the arithmetic.

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Thought leadership2026-08-30

Claims in code, judgment in prose — the line is the product

A board read 0/7 for work that had already shipped, because the rule that would have updated it lived in prose with no owner. The fix — derive every claim that has a witness, keep only judgment in prose — is honest and cheap to state, and brittle in six ways worth paying for out loud.

Thought leadership2026-08-19

The leverage number I won't publish

Everyone asks how many engineers an agent fleet is worth. Auditing the published figures — and re-deriving our own — left a rule instead of a number: a metric whose producer is its beneficiary is a claim, not a measurement.

Thought leadership2026-08-19

What comes after the pull request

Nothing was broken — eleven agents, green pipelines, and a pile of finished work nobody had accepted. Why the tooling of 2008 misses today's constraint, and what to design for instead: the gate, not the writer.

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