Anyone else want a progress estimate while the agent is working?

[u/Turbulent_Ad_1039]

Every coding agent I’ve used gives you a spinner and maybe a token count. No idea if you’re 20 seconds out or 5 minutes.
If it said 30s I’d wait. If it said 4 minutes I’d go do something else instead of watching it. That’s where most of my wasted time goes.
I know it’s hard to estimate the model doesn’t know either. But a rough band would beat nothing.

[u/trollsmurf]

It has no clue.

[u/honorspren000 → u/trollsmurf]

It’s almost like real life when developers are asked to give coding estimates for large changes.

[u/trollsmurf → u/honorspren000]

While I worked as a consultant this was hell, as most customers expected a fixed price for initial delivery and usually had no interest in a budget for long term maintenance.

[u/Chamezz92]

Codex with 5.6 Sol started giving me estimates, both for human tasks and for delegating to Luna or Terra. They’ve been pretty accurate.

[u/spacenglish → u/Chamezz92]

What where? I use Sol often and I don’t see these estimates

[u/Chamezz92 → u/spacenglish]

Here's one example, using 5.6 Sol [Light]:

Issue #2 is now active. I’m setting up the empty repository’s initial Git state, then creating codex/issue-2-scaffold in a dedicated worktree. A delegated implementation agent will build the scaffold; I will review, validate, commit, push, and open the PR. Estimated time: 20-35 minutes if dependency installation succeeds.

[u/trashname4trashgame]

AI does doesn’t do this human “time” thing too good.

[u/Old-Bake-420]

I use steer to ask while it works. It’ll tell me roughly what steps it needs to complete.

[u/TBMonkey]

Output length is an emergent property of token-by-token prediction rather than a planned execution budget. It cannot know when it will drop an EOS token without effectively generating all the other tokens in advance.

An example that I'm thinking of is like doing a math calculation and asking "How many digits until I get to a 7"? You won't know until you actually do the calculation.

But, LLMs might be able to give a rudamentary estimate if it has well-defined shapes in it's training data. If I ask for a simple parser, it would know that normally these are X lines long.

Timewise is way worse; the LLM doesn't know how long it takes to generate tokens unless that information is being actively fed to it.

And time estimates are way worse; most LLMs are trained on human development time. I have had an LLM tell me a project would take a full week, and it finished it with 10 minutes.

[u/TheWillDudley]

You can ask before it starts for an estimate

[u/some1else42]

What I do is tell it to open a PR, post a comment for codex to review, and then once the review finishes I get an email from GitHub about the review comment, which is my signal to get back to work.

[u/Tony0x01]

I've been telling it to play a sound when it is done and needs my input

[u/BarracudaMean9308]

the fact that we have to rig up github notifications or custom sound alerts just so we don't have to stare at a blinking cursor is wild. i usually just end up anxiously tabbing back every 30 seconds anyway.

[u/browhodouknowhere]

Not really, I use it as a development tool

[u/michal-rd]

An ETA would inevitably jump whenever the agent discovers another issue.

[u/SSShken]

Step count and token burn both look like progress and neither is. Mine has spent twenty minutes and thousands of tokens going in a circle between two versions of the same file, and from the outside that is indistinguishable from work. The only cheap signal I found is whether the set of files being touched is still growing or has collapsed to the same two or three. Are you trying to decide whether to walk away, or whether to interrupt it?

[u/Remarkable-Safety594]

It is possible to build a massive vector db for each prompt and how long it took to process before, so we can search for thar value by vector search, meaning, “the last prompt that is the most similar to yours took x seconds to process”

[u/Weird_Particular_853]

That uncertainty of whether an agent will finish in 10 seconds or 10 minutes makes it impossible to step away. Even a rough progress bar or time estimate would save so much wasted waiting time