goodharts-lawlisted

Apply Goodhart's Law when designing metrics, OKRs, KPIs, performance reviews, engineering productivity measures, or any system where people are evaluated by a number. Trigger on phrases like "how should we measure this?", "our metrics aren't capturing what we want", "people are gaming the metric", "velocity doesn't feel like a real measure of progress", or any situation where a measurement has become a target. Goodhart's Law is critical for anyone designing incentive systems or interpreting data.
The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer · ★ 2 · AI & Automation · score 73

Install: claude install-skill The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer

# Goodhart's Law > "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." > — Charles Goodhart, 1975 (popularized by Marilyn Strathern) ## The core idea The moment you tell people they'll be evaluated by a number, they start optimizing for that number — often in ways that are disconnected from, or actively harmful to, the underlying goal the number was meant to represent. This isn't because people are bad. It's because optimizing for a proxy is easier and more legible than optimizing for the underlying reality. ## Classic examples in software | What you measure | What gets gamed | |---|---| | Lines of code written | Verbose, redundant code | | Bugs closed | Bugs closed without fixing, or marked as duplicates | | Velocity (story points) | Points inflated per story | | Test coverage % | Trivial tests that don't assert anything meaningful | | PR count | Many tiny, low-value PRs | | Support tickets resolved | Quick closes without real resolution | | Time to first response | Auto-responses that count as "responses" | ## Why it happens A measurement is a proxy for the thing you actually care about. When you turn the proxy into the goal, you create pressure to optimize the proxy — and the path of least resistance is often to do that *without* actually improving the underlying thing. A good engineering team and a mediocre one can produce the same velocity number. A resolved ticket doesn't mean a happy customer. The number gets decoupled from reality. ## How to d