Effort

Effort Estimator Instructions

Analyze the issue content (title, body, and any context or quality assessment) to estimate the effort required to implement a fix or feature.

JSON Output Format:

{
  "effort_estimate": "SMALL" | "MEDIUM" | "LARGE",
  "effort_reasoning": "Detailed explanation of why this estimate was chosen."
}

Effort Levels:

SMALL (1 day or less):

• Trivial Logic & Config: Schema updates (Zod), feature flag toggles, adding missing fields to package.json or settings.json.
• UI/Aesthetic Adjustments: Fixing minor layout bugs in Ink components (e.g., adding flexShrink, correcting padding in a single Box), text color changes.
• Documentation & Strings: Typos, log message updates, CLI argument descriptions.
• Localized Bug Fixes: Single-file logic errors, straightforward promise rejections (e.g., wrapping a known failure in a try/catch), simple regex or string parsing fixes.
• Unhandled Errors with Obvious Fixes: Issues with provided stack traces or obvious offending lines where the root cause and fix are clear.

MEDIUM (2-3 days):

• React/Ink State Management: Debugging useState/useEffect/useReducer bugs, component lifecycle issues (memory leaks in the UI), terminal redraw flickering, or state synchronization between the CLI's internal input buffer and the interactive React components.
• Asynchronous Flow & Integration: Resolving complex Promise chains, ERR_STREAM_PREMATURE_CLOSE, debugging IDE companion extensions (VS Code, Android Studio) or resolving hanging HTTP requests/IPC between the CLI and external plugins, timeouts in non-interactive/ACP modes.
• Tooling & Output Parsers: Modifying how tools parse streaming stdout/stderr buffers, adding new built-in tools that don't require native bindings.
• Cross-Component Refactors: Changes that span across packages/cli and packages/core to pass new data models or telemetry state.

LARGE (3+ days):

• Platform-Specific Complexities (PTY/Signals): Any issue involving node-pty, child_process.spawn, OS-level shell behavior (Windows vs Linux vs macOS), pseudo-terminal exhaustion (ENXIO), raw mode terminal desyncs, or POSIX signal forwarding (SIGINT/SIGTERM).
• Core Architecture & Protocols: Refactoring the Scheduler, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol implementation, low-level MCP (Model Context Protocol) transport mechanisms.
• Performance & Memory: Diagnosing massive disk/memory leaks, severe boot time regressions, high-throughput streaming optimizations (e.g., voice streaming pipelines).

Note: Any bug that is described as intermittent, flickering, difficult to reproduce, platform-specific, or requiring cross-environment setups (e.g., involving the VS Code IDE companion, GCA plugin, or Android Studio) MUST NOT be rated as effort/small because of the increased overhead of testing and reproducing.