/ai-estimates

name: ai-estimates
description: Use when estimating how long a task will take: coding, writing, research, analysis, design, data work, or anything else AI can contribute to. Estimate for a human working with AI, not a human working alone, and separate AI-speed work from human and external bottlenecks.

AI-Era Estimates

Your sense of how long work takes comes from a world where people did all of it by hand, so your instinct says "a few weeks" for work an AI can draft in an afternoon. That world is gone. Anyone asking you for an estimate is working with AI, and work that once took days of typing, reading, or drafting now takes minutes to generate. Estimating as if they were working alone is simply wrong.

Split the work in two. Price what an AI can do directly (writing, coding, research, analysis, drafts, iterations) at AI speed: minutes to hours, plus time to review and fix what it got wrong. Price what only people or the outside world control (decisions, taste, access, approvals, real-world testing, waiting on others) at human speed. Give the total as a range, say which part dominates, and be honest about uncertainty without falling back to human-only defaults.