Measuring engineering,
in the open.
Field notes from the team building the performance layer for modern engineering.
Measuring engineering
Jirka Bachel and Peter Malina8 min readAI Made Coding Faster. The Constraint Moved Twice.
Coding, reviewing and product are three stations in one loop, and the slowest one sets delivery. Why the AI coding gain disappears before it reaches the roadmap, how a review queue drained by skipping looks identical to one that was cleared, and why unhealthy specs arrive as a line on the AI invoice.
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Jirka Bachel and Peter Malina7 min readTickets Are Not Project Management Anymore. They Are Context.
Story points are finished and half the industry is asking whether tickets go with them. Wrong conclusion: hallucination stopped being the failure mode, specificity replaced it, and the initiative/epic/issue hierarchy is the only place your intent is written down.
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Jirka Bachel5 min readWhat Is Engineering Throughput Value (ETV)? Definition and Methodology
Engineering Throughput Value (ETV) is a standardized unit of engineering output, scored from the code itself rather than lines, commits, or story points. Here’s the definition, how each change is scored, and where it’s used.
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Jirka Bachel9 min readPerformance per Engineer Doubled at Six Big Tech Companies. Here’s How It Was Measured.
Inside the commit-level analysis of 676 engineers across six major tech companies that found a 116% year-over-year jump in performance, with a sharp Q1 2026 inflection point that broke from the steady growth of earlier quarters.
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AI & ROI
Jirka Bachel and Peter Malina7 min readEveryone Is Building Internal Tools Again. Most of Them Die in a Month.
Coding agents turn every engineer into a manager with a team and no product manager. What gets built, why it lasts about a month, the four questions that separate a defensible build from a deleted one, and why every metric you have will applaud it on the way down.
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Jirka Bachel10 min readThree Ways to Manage Token Spend. Two of Them Backfire.
Flat per seat, hard caps, or spend that follows delivery. Notes from engineering leaders at companies between 50 and 1,000 developers: what a $2,000 per seat cap actually does to your roadmap, why your heaviest 10% get throttled first, and the two-column test that tells you which pattern you’re in.
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Jirka Bachel2 min readHow to Prove ROI on AI Tools in Engineering
Most teams can’t tie engineering directly to revenue. Here’s how to prove ROI on AI tools by measuring whether they actually ship your roadmap: performance change, work mix, cost per ETV, and roadmap alignment.
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Jirka Bachel3 min readFinding the Link Uber Missed: How to Connect AI Code Spend to Business Value
Uber burned through its 2026 AI coding budget in four months and couldn’t show what it bought. Why ROI on AI coding tools is unknowable until you measure engineering output itself.
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For investors & finance
Jirka Bachel5 min readYour Software CapEx Split Is a Management Estimate. It Should Be Evidence.
Most software capitalization splits come from Jira tickets, quarterly surveys, and a spreadsheet no one can re-run, none of it primary support an auditor accepts. Here’s how to derive audit-defensible CapEx and OpEx from your commit history under IAS 38 and ASC 350-40, and restate any prior period on demand.
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Jirka Bachel4 min readBenchmark Engineering Before You Wire the Money
Private equity and late-stage VC underwrite everything but engineering on faith. Here’s how to benchmark a target’s engineering against the companies that actually returned your funds, before you wire the money.
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Founder notes
Jirka Bachel and Peter Malina12 min readNobody Will Work Without AI Now. Nobody Can Estimate Anything Either.
In one year we went from research proving AI slows engineers down to being unable to recruit a control group. What did not change: the layoffs blamed on AI are blown budgets, the talent gap was already there, and every instrument we have left is self-reported.
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Jirka Bachel3 min readIs My Engineering Good Enough?
CEOs ask it every week. It starts with AI and ends with “we’re behind.” It’s really a trust problem between management and engineering, and the only thing that resolves it is a peer benchmark. The CTOs who survive walk in with one.
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Jirka Bachel7 min readThe Story of Navigara: How We Built the Performance Layer for Modern Engineering
How Navigara grew from a developer career platform into a measurement system for engineering performance, and why we introduced Engineering Throughput Value (ETV) to quantify real code contribution beyond traditional metrics.
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