Why Warclick?
Most engineering analytics tools only show you what shipped.
That's convenient — but it's dangerously incomplete.
Warclick exists because that blind spot almost caused a serious leadership mistake.
The Blind Spot That Breaks Trust
Before Warclick, I used a well-known engineering analytics tool.
One of my engineering leaders showed almost zero contribution over a long period of time. No commits. No visible activity. Nothing.
On paper, it looked like a performance issue.
A big one.
I was frustrated. I was ready to escalate.
And if I'm being honest, I was close to making the wrong call.
So I dug deeper.
What the Data Was Hiding
What I discovered changed everything.
That leader was:
- prototyping extensively on feature branches
- mentoring engineers through real working code
- providing architectural direction via hands-on implementation
- intentionally letting others carry the final PRs
Two things were happening that competing tools completely missed:
- None of the work lived on the default branch
- Most of the commits were squashed and reattributed
In other words, the leader was doing exactly what a strong engineering leader should do — and the tools were erasing his impact.
The Default-Branch Fallacy
Most analytics products only track commits that make it to main.
That means they silently ignore:
- prototypes
- experiments
- mentoring through working code
- architectural spikes
- exploratory work that informs others
- commits that get squashed and reattributed during PRs
The result is a distorted picture where:
- hands-on leaders look inactive
- mentors disappear
- collaboration is punished
- and visibility is granted only to whoever clicks "Merge"
That's not leadership.
That's accounting theater.
Why Warclick Is Different (and Why It Had to Be)
Warclick was built specifically to fix this.
We:
- crawl off the default branch
- capture activity across all branches
- track effort whether or not it ships
- link squashed commits back to the original author using metadata
- preserve attribution even when others perform the final PR
Once I did this, the truth became obvious.
That engineering leader wasn't underperforming.
He was one of the most active builders on the team.
The tool didn't just show activity — it prevented a bad leadership decision.