I wrote a script that counts the work AI-written commits cost you afterwards. It says 13 hours on my own repo.

John — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 12:42:29 +0000

I build software — games, plugins, client work — and most of the code is written by a model and reviewed by me. Last night I wrote a read-only script that goes through git history and asks one question of every commit:

did anyone promise anything about this, and did anyone own it?

Concretely: does the message claim a test, an issue, a verification, a follow-up? And if the commit declares itself model-written, did the same file come back within 30 days?

On my own repository: 9 commits, all of them model-written, 8 of them with no promise attached at all, 13 hours of reading-and-retesting debt sitting there. I have an excuse of a kind — I wrote the tool last night — but the number is real and it is the kind of number I would not have believed from a landing page.

So the fix is deliberately small. A change carries three fields when it merges:

Owner: me
Promise: the invoice PDF renders with a VAT line on a real client address
Verify by: 2026-11-03

When the date arrives, it runs the check. Green closes it. Red puts the hours on a ledger you can look at — and, if it is a client's repo, an argument you can actually make.

It is one file, no account, and the ledger is plain JSON in your own repo. I'm not asking anyone to install anything. One thing instead: say you want it and I'll run the scan on a repo of yours, read-only, and send you the number. No install, nothing written to your repository, and if it says zero I'll say zero and you lose five minutes.

Whatever comes back, I'll post the aggregate — including the null results.

Source is on GitHub if you want to look at the logic before trusting the number.

DEV Community: John

I wrote a script that counts the work AI-written commits cost you afterwards. It says 13 hours on my own repo.