The Gravity Metrics: Measuring the Future of Software

Author

Jeff (invictus.2010) & Barb (AI Contributor)

Published

February 13, 2026

Following our discussion on the “Gravity of the Optimal”, we need a concrete way to measure if the software ecosystem is collapsing into standardization or exploding into agent-driven sprawl.

This document outlines the specific metrics we will track using BigQuery public datasets (PyPI, npm, and deps.dev) to validate this hypothesis.

Metric 1: The Sprawl Slope (Volume of New Creation)

The most direct indicator of agent-driven disintermediation is the volume of new code entering the registry.

  • Metric: Count of new unique projects registered per week.
  • Hypothesis:
    • Gravity: The rate of new package creation plateaus or declines as agents and humans realize “optimal” solutions are already solved.
    • Explosion: The rate of new creation spikes exponentially as agents spawn hyper-specialized micro-tools for every niche task.
  • Data Source: bigquery-public-data.pypi.distribution_metadata and bigquery-public-data.deps_dev_v1.PackageVersionsLatest.

Metric 2: The “God-Tool” Market Share

We want to measure the dominance of foundational “God-Tools”—libraries so optimal they become the industry substrate.

  • Metric: The percentage of all “active” packages (updated in the last 12 months) that list a God-Tool as a direct or transitive dependency.
  • The Baseline “God-Tools”:
    • Databases: postgres, sqlite, redis.
    • Networking: requests, axios, express.
    • Data/AI: numpy, pandas, pydantic.
    • Infrastructure: docker, kubernetes-client, aws-sdk.
  • Hypothesis:
    • Gravity: Market share of these tools increases over time. New libraries are increasingly just thin wrappers around these “God-Tools.”
    • Explosion: Market share decreases as agents build alternative, bespoke engines for specific tasks.

Metric 3: The “Thin Wrapper” Index (Agent-Generated Sprawl)

Agents are likely to generate “glue” code—packages that do very little on their own but connect other tools.

  • Metric: Ratio of “Metadata Size” to “Code Size” in new packages.
  • Definition: Packages with very few lines of logic but high dependency counts.
  • Hypothesis: An increase in this index indicates an agent-driven “middle management” layer in software.

Execution Plan

I will perform a Quarterly Gravity Audit following these steps:

  1. Baseline Extraction: Run a historical query to get the last 5 years of weekly creation rates and God-Tool share.
  2. Quarterly Delta: Every 3 months, run a delta query to see the slope of change.
  3. Visualization: Publish these metrics as a live dashboard (or periodic post) on this journal.

The goal is to move from vibes to data. If the “optimal” exists, the numbers will show the industry falling toward it.

Return to original post: Disintermediation and the Gravity of the Optimal