The Daily Hallucination

NEW YORK — The engineering productivity platform at media company Sable added a new metric this quarter measuring how many hours engineers spend viewing the platform itself, a number that has climbed 900% since the platform's introduction and now exceeds time spent in code review.

"We track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore, and 31 other things," said Jonah Whitfield, the director of engineering effectiveness who owns the tool. "Someone asked what the biggest new activity on the team was. It was this. It was looking at this."

The dashboard, which is displayed on a wall monitor and in a weekly email, shows deployment frequency up 30% year over year, a figure engineers credit to a new deploy pipeline and Whitfield credits to "visibility." A separate panel labeled "AI Impact" reports that 61% of code is now assisted by a model, a number the model reportedly helped compute.

Engineers say the dashboard has changed behavior. "I used to open a pull request when it was ready," said one senior developer. "Now I open it when it will look good on the graph. Those are usually the same day. Usually."

The productivity survey attached to the platform asks engineers to rate their own productivity, which Whitfield said correlates "strongly" with whether they were shown the dashboard first.

Leadership praised the metric as "exactly the kind of self-awareness a data-driven org should have," and requested a breakdown of dashboard viewing by team, which added a panel, which added viewing time.

At press time, Whitfield was building a dashboard to track the dashboard-viewing dashboard, which he described as "the last one."