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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.

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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."

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