Room 02 · Planning
Complexity is a routing signal, not a guess at destiny.
Estimation classifies a grounded plan as Easy, Medium, or Advanced and records why, without pretending to know an exact duration or cost.
Why estimation follows planning
An unplanned idea is too ambiguous to classify usefully. Once the planner has defined the outcome, acceptance criteria, Bead tree, and dependencies, the estimator can judge the work that actually exists instead of reacting to a short title.
The current scale
- Easy — bounded and familiar work with low coupling and a small blast radius.
- Medium — meaningful coordination, ambiguity, or risk, but within known patterns.
- Advanced — high coupling, consequential state changes, difficult concurrency, broad external effects, or substantial uncertainty.
The classification should record its source: human-assigned or machine-estimated. A machine estimate should not silently overwrite a human classification.
What informs the classification
The estimator can consider:
- coupling across components or repositories;
- migration and persistent-state risk;
- concurrency and ordering constraints;
- external systems or irreversible effects;
- unresolved ambiguity;
- the blast radius of getting the change wrong.
What complexity is not
Complexity is not priority, business importance, an exact time forecast, or an exact monetary estimate. It is one input to later routing and budget decisions.
Actual runs can eventually make the estimates better: compare the classification with retries, review outcomes, cost, and the shape of the delivered work, then revise the estimation rules rather than rewriting history.