Measure effort, not lines of code
Lines of code is the worst way to understand engineering work. Here's the fairer signal — and how truelo estimates effort from what actually changed.
Every few years someone tries to rank engineers by lines of code, and every time it rewards the wrong behaviour: churn, copy-paste, and giant mechanical diffs. The best change of the week might be a two-line fix that saves a payment path.
Why lines of code fail
- A one-line fix can be the highest-impact work of the day.
- Refactors and deletions look 'negative' but improve the codebase.
- Generated code and lockfiles inflate totals meaninglessly.
- It quietly pressures people to write more code, not better code.
A fairer signal: content-based effort
truelo estimates effort from what actually changed — the shape of the diff, the tickets touched, the branches in flight — not a raw line count. It also folds in self-reported non-code work like QA, calls and reviews, so a light-commit day of pairing and code review still reads fairly.
Keep it team-level
Effort is a property of the team, not a scoreboard of individuals. truelo shows numbers team-level by default, lets everyone open their own, and never stack-ranks people. Use it for context — who might be blocked or overloaded — not for performance reviews.
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