Comment by ripped_britches
3 hours ago
I don’t do a ton of estimation but an interesting new thing is asking a cli agent to estimate for you.
First impressions with this is they give really long estimates.
Also, due to coding agents, you can have them completely implement several different approaches and find a lot of unknown unknowns up front.
I was building a mobile app and couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to do two native apps or one RN/Expo app. I had two different agents do each one fully vibe coded and then tell me all the issues they hit (specific to my app, not general differences). Helped a ton.
I think Claude’s estimates are biased towards huge enterprise projects.
I asked it to estimate a timeline for a feature in my hobby project and it confidently replied, “4.5 weeks to code completion”.
Less than 4 hours later, the feature was done. I asked it to compare this against its initial estimate and it replied, “Right on schedule!”
I have completely given up on using it to estimate anything that actually matters.
It's a next-word-prediction-machine, not a calculator. It's not aware of the passage of time, or how long things take, and doesn't reason about anything. It's just very good at putting words together in combinations that look like answers to your inputs.
That's really useful for some tasks, like regurgitating code to perform a specific function, but it's basically useless for jobs like estimating schedules.
I don’t disagree. But have you tried estimation using Claude or Cursor? If not, give it a try.