Research
We scored 15+ open-source projects your teams depend on—LangChain, Llama, Supabase, Next.js, and more. Each one measured for semantic health, issue patterns, and Innovation Tax.
Below the $2.00 threshold: teams ship. Above it: they stall. The same patterns exist in your private repos. You just can't see them yet.
Fleet Analysis
Each shape is a project's semantic health signature. Smooth and complete means aligned; spiky and fragmented means drifting. The Innovation Tax score quantifies how much maintenance overhead each project carries relative to new capability.
Live visualization — each shape animates based on actual Innovation Tax parameters
Sample of our analysis across 15+ open-source projects
Elite
Tax < $2.00
Innovation outpaces maintenance
Warning
Tax $2.00–$2.50
Tipping point approaching
Crisis
Tax $2.50–$4.00
Maintenance drowning innovation
Terminal
Tax > $4.00
Technical bankruptcy imminent
Free beta · No source code required · See real Innovation Tax scores
What We Find
Context collapse manifests in predictable patterns. Here's what it looks like in your repositories:
Blind Spot 01
Do you know which repositories go dark when she's out? Which pull requests will sit unreviewed? Which critical knowledge exists only in her head?
Average cost of a key-person departure: 4–6 months of lost productivity.
Blind Spot 02
Not because your team is bad—because "secure" meant encrypted-at-rest to infrastructure and OAuth-compliant to product. Two teams, same word, different implementations. Both shipped. One left a gap.
Zombie features consume 20–40% of maintenance budgets.
Blind Spot 03
Leadership asks "what are users complaining about?" and your team spends days pulling data manually. Meanwhile, a critical pattern—23% of issues linked to one root cause—sits buried.
Teams spend 10+ hours/week on triage that AI does in minutes.
This isn't anecdotal. LangChain has 47 "expensive words" that mean different things in different contexts. vLLM's authentication topic shows critical semantic drift. Next.js has an Innovation Tax of $4.74—for every $1 of new capability, $4.74 goes to maintenance. These are the numbers your dashboards can't show you.
Methodology
DORA and SPACE tell you velocity and satisfaction. They can't tell you that three teams are using "deployed" to mean three different things, or that your most-maintained feature has zero user demand. We're not replacing your metrics—we're surfacing what they're blind to.
This isn't a feature Atlassian forgot to build. It's a fundamentally different way of looking at engineering productivity. And we have the patent to prove it.
Complementary to DORA & SPACE
| DORA / SPACE | Beyond The Alignment | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Outputs (velocity, cycle time, satisfaction) | Inputs (what users and teams are actually saying) |
| Visibility | How fast you shipped | Whether you shipped the right thing |
| Developer Impact | Requires surveys & workflow changes | Zero interruption — reads what already exists |
| Methodology | Standard analytics | Patented Linguistic Debt™ analysis (US 12,106,240) |
| Root Cause | Measures symptoms (velocity drops, satisfaction dips) | Diagnoses cause (semantic drift, context collapse) |
We're not replacing DORA or SPACE — we're surfacing the inputs that make those outputs meaningful.
The Engine
Most tools measure code. We measure language—the words your teams use in issues, PRs, and discussions. When the same term means different things to different people, costs compound silently. Our patented methodology (US 12,106,240) quantifies this and turns it into an actionable score.
The Innovation Tax formula: Liability Work ÷ Asset Work. High-performing teams maintain a ratio below $2.00. When Tax crosses that threshold, you're paying $2.00 in maintenance for every $1.00 of innovation—65% of engineering capacity burnt on keeping lights on.
Linguistic Debt is a registered methodology of Beyond The Alignment.
Case Studies
Each case study applies our Linguistic Debt™ methodology to a major open-source project, revealing patterns of semantic drift that standard metrics miss.
Elite
Innovation Tax: $0.63. How semantic alignment enables rapid scaling in AI tooling.
Coming Soon
Warning
Innovation Tax: $2.09. The tipping point where semantic drift starts to compound.
Coming Soon
Terminal
Innovation Tax: $4.74. What technical bankruptcy looks like at scale.
Coming Soon
Find out if yours can.
Run your repos through the platform. See your Innovation Tax: maintenance vs. innovation spend, alignment breaks, tipping point proximity. If everything really is fine, you'll know.
Most teams find their first blind spot within the first hour.
Now accepting beta testers
No source code required · Works with public GitHub data and ticket metadata