Comment by cvwright
5 hours ago
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.