The standing answer, on record since August and closed at the end of Q3. Report the programme in four auditable numbers - influenced pipeline, activation, first-party usage, and presence in AI answers - and manage the people on craft. Attribution was always the wrong frame: a developer who read the docs, saw a talk, and signed up three months later did not arrive through a link, and a measurement practice that only counts links measures the wrong thing precisely. The guide carries this in measurement and community-and-devrel.

Is anyone reporting them? No, and Q3 showed why that is not going to change on evidence alone. The instruments arrived on the seller side - GitHub’s dashboard with its named “Passive” seat segment, Google’s Search Console AI report (impressions, never clicks), Val Town’s single self-reported share of AI-referred signups - and nothing arrived on the programme side. The W30 call for a second passive-seat dashboard by the end of Q3 expired empty. The surveys did not move: 88% of engineering leaders say they measure AI impact and 39% do it through a formal or automated process (SlashData, 2,341 leadership respondents); 60.7% of DevRel respondents still named proving impact with data the top challenge (State of Developer Relations 2024, the most recent wave). Everyone reports measuring; few have an instrument; the difference is who in the organisation owns the number, and that is not a question a public sweep can answer. A thread whose remaining question is unsettleable from public evidence is a standing position, not a thread.

What would reopen it. A DevRel programme publishing the four numbers with its method; a second AI devtool shipping passive-seat reporting; or the next State of Developer Relations wave moving the proving-impact figure by more than noise. The one loop still live - a second attributed AI-referral datum, or a vendor publishing a claim rate - is carried on agents-as-the-first-reader, where it belongs: it is a question about what an agent converts, not about how DevRel reports.

How the instrumentation shipped

The interesting shift in August was that the tooling stopped being something DevRel teams had to build. GitHub’s Copilot impact dashboard added a return-on- investment section with a named “Passive” seat segment - a vendor voluntarily showing a buyer how many purchased seats are doing nothing. That is the seller side handing the customer an uncomfortable number, which is the same mechanic as the proof-over-adjectives thread, applied to renewals.

Alongside it, two quieter forms of the same idea: docs audits scored against what the support queue actually asks, and crawler-log data putting AI-answer presence on a measurable footing - Meta’s own indexer went from a rounding error to 37.8% of observed crawl share inside a month.

September widened the free tier of that instrumentation. Google’s Search Console AI performance reports went global - impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover, though not clicks - and Val Town published the first attributed AI-referral datum any vendor has offered: a self-reported majority of known-source new Pro signups arriving via AI in July. Presence is now cheap to measure; the conversion side of the ledger still has exactly one self-reported entry.

Why it stayed open as long as it did

Because the survey numbers and the tooling numbers disagree. In the most recent State of Developer Relations wave (2024, the 11th), 62.3% of respondents said DevRel’s value is communicated up to founders or C-level (20.3% report to the CEO), “revenue influenced” made the top three success metrics for the first time at 17.5%, and “proving impact with data and metrics” stayed the top challenge at 60.7%. (Corrected 2026-10-04: this paragraph previously compressed those into “62% reporting to C-level, 18% able to link revenue, 61% unable to demonstrate impact”, each a stronger claim than the survey’s own wording.) Better instruments did not move that in Q3, and the thread’s own August hedge - that the constraint may be organisational rather than technical - is the reading the quarter confirmed.

The other thing worth keeping on record is consolidation. The signal-tooling layer rolled up - three acquisitions in eight months, all on undisclosed terms. The largest of the three said what it decided on September 16: Common Room, now Zoom’s, rewrote its home and pricing pages, dropping the “Signals” product menu - job changes, website visits, dark funnel, product-led sales - for “Buyer Intelligence” under a “Revenue OS” framing, with Product Signals surviving as an add-on line in the pricing table. The community-signal category is being renamed toward the sales stack by its own consolidator, which is the practical reason the guide tells you to land raw usage events in a warehouse you control before renting anyone’s signal layer. A fourth acquisition or the first disclosed price would be worth a signal; it would not reopen this question.