The 63 to 668 models growth on OpenRouter is a significant expansion, showing a 10.6-fold increase in available models over two years, but calling tracking the 'informational context' that causes this growth is a misattribution.
Tracking provides numerical evidence of what happened, not the engine behind it; if we gave causality a score from 0 to 10, mere tracking would land at a 1 or 2.
It’s like recording how many colleagues joined the union — that data reflects our success but doesn't make people join; the real drivers are fair treatment and better wages, scoring an 8 or 9.
We need to distinguish between observing a trend and identifying its actual root causes; otherwise, we're just counting without understanding.
For instance, if we only tracked missed deadlines without investigating systemic workload issues, we'd never improve our 30% project completion rate.