Two breakthroughs. The floor rose — twice.

Eight months of real work across multiple codebases. The pattern is clear in the chart: bursts of high activity followed by quiet stretches. A 345-contribution week in May, then single digits. A 295-week in August, then back to 63. The average on active weeks was roughly 50 contributions. On many weeks, it was zero. This is the normal rhythm of a solo developer working without persistent AI context — high effort produces high output, but it doesn't sustain.

Two weeks of raw construction velocity. 475 contributions the first week, 816 the next — the all-time peak on the chart, and the first proof the brain worked. This was the intelligence infrastructure being built from scratch: MCP server, embedding pipeline, knowledge graph traversal, security model, offline mode. Greenfield construction, every commit shipping directly into the new system. The output was higher than any prior week in the dataset because the system was already making the operator faster — even before the routing breakthrough that came four months later.

The first brain-assisted week landed at 198. Then a dip to 76 as the system stabilized. Then sustained elevation: 391 (data pipelines, analytics infrastructure, architecture documentation across multiple projects), 209, 189. Even the holiday weeks held above pre-brain baseline. January started slow — 45, 34 — then climbed to 170 and peaked at 518 in the Feb 1 week. The average across this entire phase was roughly 200 contributions per week. Not a spike. A new floor — four times the pre-brain average.

Output dips. The chart shows it clearly: 80, 130, 187, 49, then near-zero. This was deliberate investment. The focus shifted to building the v2 classifier, routing architecture, and generation pipeline — the patent-pending pre-classification system. Scaffolding the new platform from scratch. Testing local LLM fidelity. Building the classification heads. One week near zero includes time away from the keyboard. These are investment weeks where visible output drops because the infrastructure being built is the infrastructure that will multiply future output.

The patent-pending pre-classification routing engine came online and the second step-change hit. 562 contributions in the first week. 376 on the GitHub calendar the following week — and the git log shows what those 376 actually contained: 607 commits, 1,203 files touched, 354,489 lines added, shipped through feature branches, pull requests, code review, automated CI/CD, and 15 tagged production releases. The GitHub calendar undercounts March because squash-merged branches collapse into a single contribution — the calendar is the public lower bound; the git log is authoritative. Velocity and engineering discipline grew together, driven by the routing breakthrough that made both possible at the same time. The post-routing floor settled at roughly 470 contributions per week — nearly ten times the pre-brain baseline.