I've built this tool so you can sanity-check or improve your time estimates for coding tasks. It does not matter what task you are trying to estimate, empirically everyone underestimates the time it takes to finish a task. Not because we work slowly or are lazy, it's because there are much more factors that go into solving a task than just writing code. I would actually say, coding is one of the least time consuming parts of a problem
Small AI hype rant
That's also why I think the current AI hype is not justified. We shave hours off of weeks or months long projects by going all-in in the code productivity. It costs billions to achieve this and we save close to nothing in the long run because even if your coding time doubles it would not greatly impact the time it takes for a weeks/months/years long project to complete. THe only projects that would greatly benefit from code productivity are script projects, one person projects or stuff that should get rushed out asap without need for quality work. psssss I think we drift into a world where we actually want quantity over quality for some reason.
Rant over.
and to make this clear Fides does not only give you an updated time estimate for the time you gave it, it also breaks it down into 4 different categories. And it's funny to see that for example a estimate of 30 minutes for a task would be basically impossible if you wanted to test and review your work and if you have at least one small question about the topic it's completely off now. Everything would have to be the perfect storm to work out and that's not what you want to hope for. 3 minutes of testing time is not enough, it does not matter how you test, if it's automated you need more than 3 minutes to write + run the tests a single time. If it's by hand you are doing it wrong in only 3 minutes.
So why not going with an estimate that is actually more realistic. As a meme, seniors often say 'just multiply your estimate by 3 and you are good to go'. But I think there is quite some truth in this statement, especially for tasks that are quite short. If a junior estimates 30 minutes it's more likely to take 90 minutes, if it's an hour you probably are more in the 2.5 - 3 hours range. If you estimate 4 weeks, it's probably more like 4.5 weeks and so on. Nobody looks at you and says 'Oh boy, this dev can only solve this problem in 90 minutes instead of 30 minutes. What a loser!', everyone looks at you and asks you how the hell you are so good at estimating times. You will be a estimation rockstar!
You can try it out now at Fides, currently the estimate is just a exponential function that smoothly transitions from multiplying by 3 to multiplying by 1. The real value lies in the breakdown that shows you how much time there is for specific parts of the problem.
Cheers!