That's why you split tasks and do project management 101.

That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again.

When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc.

We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of those problems". But they're often involved in evaluation/scoping down/breakdown of problem/supervising/correcting/etc.

There's tons of analogies and decades of industry experience to apply here.

Yeah... you split tasks into consecutively smaller tasks until it's estimateable.

I'm not saying that can't be done, but taking a large task that hasn't been broken down needs, you guessed it, a powerful agent. that's your senior engineer who can figure out the rote parts, the medium parts, and the thorny parts.

the goal isn't to have an engineer do that. we should still be throwing powerful agents at a problem, they should just be delegating the work more efficiently.

throwing either an engineer or an agent at any unexplored work means you just have to delegate the most experienced resource to, or suffer the consequences.

I don't completely agree. Estimation is nontrivial, but not necessarily a random guess. Teams of human engineers have been doing this for decades -- not always with great success, but better than random. Deciding whether to put an intern or your best staff engineer on a problem is a challenge known to any engineering manager and TPM.

or tech lead. or whoever. the point is, someone has to do the sizing. I think applying an underpowered agent to a task of unknown size is about as good as getting the intern to do it.

Even EMs and TPMs are assigning people based on their previous experience, which generally boils down to "i've seen this task before and I know what's involved," "this task is small, and I know what's involved," or "this task is too big and needs to be understood better."

We should lean on the LLMs to do estimation. Claude loves to estimate that a plan will take two weeks, then implements the whole thing in 45 minutes.