Glossary
Last updated June 6, 2026
Short definitions of the terms DevGhost uses.
- Ghost%
- A single metric for how much engineering work a team delivers, measured against a pre-AI baseline. 100% is roughly one reference developer's day of difficulty per working day; above 100% reflects AI leverage.
- Ghost norm (pre-AI baseline)
- The denominator of Ghost%: three hours of focused, productive code output per working day for one reference developer.
- Cognitive effort
- The estimated difficulty of a code change, expressed in reference-developer hours — not lines changed, and not wall-clock time.
- AI leverage
- How much more a team delivers than the pre-AI baseline — the gap Ghost% surfaces above 100%.
- Reference developer
- The yardstick for every estimate: a mid-level developer (3–4 years) who knows the codebase and works without AI.
- FTE-day
- One full-time-equivalent developer-day. Effort expressed in whole reference-developer days, used in DevGhost's cost and market-value views.