zlacker

Ambiguity increasingly feels like the crux of estimation. By that I mean the extent to which you have a clear idea of what needs to be done before you start the work.

I do a lot of fussy UI finesse work, which on the surface are small changes, so people are tempted to give them small estimates. But they often take a while because you’re really learning what needs to be done as you’re doing it.

On the other end of the spectrum I’ve seen tickets that are very large in terms of the magnitude of the change, but very well specified and understood — so don’t actually take that long (the biggest bottleneck seems to be the need to break down the work into reviewable units).

In the LLM age, I think the ambiguity angle is going to much more apparent, as the raw size of the change becomes even less of an input into how long it takes.