GitHub contribution graphs were never designed as a productivity signal, yet many of us implicitly treat them as one.
I’ve been working on systems where the focus is on traceable output rather than symbolic activity, and it raised a question for me: are we optimizing real work, or just the appearance of consistency?
Automation (CI, linters, scheduled jobs, even auto-commits) often gets criticized as “gaming the system”, but maybe the deeper issue is that the system was never measuring the right thing in the first place.
I published a small research/tooling bundle exploring this angle here: https://zenodo.org/records/18100154
Curious how others here think about metrics vs actual work. When does optimization become distortion, and when is it just friction removal?