The unit your Story Points were always pretending to be.
CU measures the contribution of a pull request — comparable across people, teams, vendors, and tools. Story Points are negotiated per team and deflate as tools improve. CU is anchored to the work itself: the same task is worth the same CU, in 2023 and in 2026.
Volume of work, plus everything a mid-level developer couldn't have done.
CU is not a difficulty poker card. It is a measure of delivered contribution, built from two parts: how much work shipped, and how much of it required expertise above a baseline mid-level developer working without AI.
All logical concerns delivered: features, endpoints, screens, workflows, migrations. Repetition is discounted sublinearly — 10 similar screens are worth less than 10× one screen, but never rounded down to one. Pure mechanics (mass renames, codegen) score near zero regardless of file count.
Technical, Domain, Integration, Investigation, Safeguarding. Each captures value a baseline mid-dev would deliver worse, slower, or not at all — new architecture, hard business rules, hostile external systems, week-long root-cause hunts, deliberate safety engineering.
Every PR is scored 0–10 on six axes.
One volume axis plus five expertise bonuses. A PR that spikes on one or two axes is not dragged down by zeros on the rest — a 3-line fix after a week of debugging lands high.
Scope
Amount of work delivered, discounted for repetition. Decisions count; mechanics don't.
Technical
New patterns, standards, architecture; algorithmic difficulty. First-in-codebase counts.
Domain
Business and regulatory rules the developer had to understand and encode correctly.
Integration
Systems outside your codebase — external APIs, SDKs, cloud, legacy. Starts at the network boundary.
Investigation
Work invisible in the diff — debugging, tracing, root-cause analysis. The problem's difficulty, not the author's clock.
Safeguarding
Deliberate safety engineering, weighted up in 24/7, money-handling, or regulated systems.
Weights are defaults, configurable per project — a bank can weight Safeguarding up and Scope down. The axes reconcile into a final CU on a 0–30 scale.
Anchored to real work, not vibes.
The scale is pinned by concrete calibration anchors, so a CU means the same thing in every team, on every repo, forever.
CU doesn't move when your tools do.
Story Points measure team-relative effort — so when AI makes everyone faster, the points quietly deflate and your velocity chart flatters itself. CU is anchored to the work.
A task that was CU 8 in 2023 is still CU 8 in 2026. That is what makes productivity measurable across the AI transition.
Built to resist gaming.
The scoring rubric encodes explicit anti-patterns — the tricks that inflate every other metric are worth nothing here.
See your backlog in CU.
Connect a repo and watch real pull requests land on the scale — with the per-axis breakdown for every score.