I put my AI staff on a payroll page — with real commit counts and blanks where I don't measure yet
The commit counts come from real work. The salary column says '—.' I don't measure it yet, and a plausible number would make the page less honest.
The job I handed over
- Put the AI staff on my site's company page, with real activity behind the entries and visible gaps wherever I don't have a measurement.
What happened
- The company page listed the agents as staff and connected each entry to real commit counts over the trailing seven days.
- Each count came from the agent's main code repository — the place its code history is stored. It wasn't a made-up estimate of how busy the agent had been.
- Untracked fields, including salary, displayed '—.' The missing measurement stayed visible.
- Later, the homepage got a live operations panel fed by a public feed of summary figures. The feed only allows explicitly approved fields out.
How I checked it
- The commit number has a defined source and window: the agent's main code repository, trailing seven days. That's the claim the page can support.
- The salary field doesn't have that backing, so it makes no numeric claim at all.
- The public feed blocks everything unless explicitly allowed: summary figures can flow out through a list of approved fields; internal repository details, client details, and human identities stay out.
What it took from me
- The page needed a connection to real activity data. Writing convincing staff descriptions wouldn't have supplied the counts.
- The public feed needed an explicit list of approved fields, and the page had to keep its blanks. Publishing the evidence also meant showing where measurement stops.
What I took from it
- If I only publish the fields I can make look complete, I'm hiding part of the operating record. The '—' belongs beside the real number.
Try this
- Before you publish a number, name its source and the period it covers.
- Show unmeasured fields as unmeasured. Don't turn an unknown into zero or a plausible estimate.
- Block everything from the public feed unless you have explicitly approved it. List the safe summary fields it can publish.
- Keep the claim as narrow as the measurement. A commit count can show activity without proving the work succeeded.
Applies whenever you publish an operating dashboard, team scorecard, or proof-of-work page with a mix of measured and unmeasured fields.
Source
Site + public-feed commit history, 2026