Software projects.
In plain English.
What got built, who did the work, and what needs attention, written from the code for people who don’t read it.
Daily or weekly · $10 per developer a month
Productivity
What got built this week
Your payment provider sometimes sends the same notification twice. The fix now spots the repeat and records the payment once.
See how we assess the workContributors
Needs attention
| Engineer | Work this week | Infrastructure | Production fixes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 32% | No changes recorded | No changes recorded |
| B | 18% | No changes recorded | No changes recorded |
| C | 16% | No changes recorded | No changes recorded |
| D | 14% | Changes recorded | Changes recorded |
| E | 12% | No changes recorded | No changes recorded |
| F | 8% | No changes recorded | No changes recorded |
If that person is away during an outage, nobody else has touched the systems that would need fixing. Ask who else could restore service.
Every week, on the record
Each report is written from that week’s changes and kept, so you can look back at any week and see what was built and what was flagged at the time.
From real projects
Anonymised reports from a startup, a small business and a solo contract, with the full evidence behind each one.
AI SaaS · Outside agency · 5 weeks
The agency delivered the phone system, the follow-ups by email and text, a staff dashboard and reports, and the hard parts were done carefully.
Next: Have a second engineer review the calling system and its safeguards before onboarding customers at volume.
Read the assessmentConsumer app · Outside agency · 7 months
An AI receptionist that answers calls, quotes jobs and books appointments. The later months added proper tests and safeguards around calls and payments.
Next: A one-time security review is still due, and the booking and follow-up tools should be checked.
Read the assessmentSubscription app · Solo contractor
Revenue recovery, payment analytics and invoicing all work. Customer accounts and payment handling have problems, and almost nothing is covered by automated tests.
Next: Have a senior developer fix the account and payment problems first. The product does not need a rebuild.
Read the assessmentWithout DevWatch
Asked every dayYou ask “what are you working on?” They say:
With DevWatch
Nobody was askedWhat actually happened, in English:
“Working through the auth changes. Should have a PR up tomorrow.”
Started rebuilding sign-in so the app keeps working when it runs on more than one server. The work is not finished.
“Moved the exports onto a background worker.”
Large exports no longer hold up the app. Customers can keep working while their file is prepared.
“Auth and background exports are merged. Scheduled exports are next week.”
Sign-in and large-file exports are complete. Work on automatically scheduled exports starts next week.
Three days of an illustrative week · the real reports are on the sample page
The problem
Every “what are you working on?” costs twice.
You spend time asking and then translating the answer, and your developer stops building to explain it. That repeats across people, projects and weeks.
DevWatch sends the routine update, so your developers keep working.
How we assess the work
Copying a library can add 40,000 lines. Making eight lines work correctly when requests arrive together takes a different kind of effort. DevWatch assesses the changes and explains the reasoning.
A tricky integration and a routine screen are not the same amount of work. Changes are assessed for difficulty, with detected generated and copied code excluded from the work credited. The report gives the reasoning behind the assessment, with confidence and limitations.
-- processed.payment_id is UNIQUE
WITH claimed AS (
INSERT INTO processed (payment_id)
VALUES ($1) ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING
RETURNING payment_id
)
INSERT INTO ledger (payment_id, amount)
SELECT payment_id, $2 FROM claimed;Architecture review
One small team runs four separate systems, and a routine feature needs changes in all four. You pay for the extra testing, the coordinated releases and the upkeep, and customer-facing work takes longer to ship.
The report asks what business need the split serves, because nothing in the history shows one.
Four releases for one feature, and one team coordinating all of them.
Consider bringing the parts that always change together into one application. Keep services separate where growth, security or separate teams justify the extra cost.
Get started
Connect your repository and the first report covers your project’s history so far. There is no sales call.
Questions
What the report can tell you, what it cannot, and where your code goes.
Need access to your repository? ↗It tells you what was built in the period, how hard that work was and how carefully it was done, in plain English, so you can set it against what you agreed and what you were told. It also shows what exists so far and what is still unfinished, though only your agreement says what done means. When the work looks thin, the report says so and suggests a senior developer take a look rather than drawing the conclusion for you.
It reads the code and the history of every change to it. It does not record screens, keystrokes or hours at a desk, and it has no view of meetings, planning or support work, so a quiet week in the code is reported as quiet and never as a shortfall. When the evidence is thin, the report says so.
Both. Reports cover everyone who commits to the repository, whether that is one contractor or a team of thirty, and a person who commits under several email addresses is shown as one person.
Yes, and we recommend it. The reports are written to be read by the people who did the work, and you can give a named person read access to a project.
It is common. Ask your developer or agency to give you access, or to move the repository into an account you control. There is aletter you can send them.
It is read once, by the AI model that writes your report, and the copy is deleted afterwards. Only the report is kept.
$10 per developer a month, plus the AI model usage for reading their work at the providers’ published prices with a markup. A quiet repository costs little to read and a busy one costs more. One observer who only reads the reports is included, and each additional observer is $4 a month.