deterministic-metric-design

Inventing deterministic metrics — turning a fuzzy property like 'maintainability', 'risk', or 'how reducible this code is' into a deterministic, computable number an agent can trust and optimize. Covers the path from construct to adoption — operationalizing the construct, confronting computability limits (Kolmogorov, Rice) with sound proxies, picking the right measurement scale, proving properties (monotonicity, invariance, the Weyuker/Briand axioms), guaranteeing determinism, establishing construct validity (not just LOC in disguise), and hardening against Goodhart-style gaming when an agent optimizes the metric. Trigger when designing, reviewing, or validating a quantitative metric, score, measure, or index — and even when the user doesn't say 'metric' but wants to quantify, score, rank, or measure code/behavior, build a deterministic optimization target, or invent a measure for something previously unquantified (e.g., behavior-preserving codebase-size reduction).