estimate

A command for making a Fermi estimate: a rough answer built by breaking a question into several bounded factors. It gives a low-to-high range instead of pretending to know an exact number.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to estimate quantities such as demand, capacity, cost, or time, then compare the result with a second calculation to spot large disagreements.
Why use it?
It helps answer questions with incomplete data while making the assumptions and biggest unknown clear.

Command for Claude Code

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/cdeust/ai-architect-mcp-codebase/estimate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeust/ai-architect-mcp-codebase

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 180 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00180
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00090
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00036
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00018

Measured 2d ago against content hash 05bbd7e0a100, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

estimate scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/commands/zetetic/estimate.md · 28 lines

What it actually says

Quick Estimate

Fast Fermi bracket for a question. Produces an order-of-magnitude bound in under 2 minutes.

Instructions

  1. Take the question from $ARGUMENTS. If no units given, ask for units.

  2. Decompose into 3-5 bracketable factors. State the source or reasoning for each bound.

  3. Multiply to get the bracket [low, high].

  4. Name the dominant uncertainty (the widest factor).

  5. Cross-check with one independent decomposition. If they disagree by >10x, flag it.

  6. Present:

    Quick Estimate: [question]
    Bracket: [low] to [high]
    Dominant uncertainty: [factor]
    Cross-check: [agrees/disagrees to x?]
    
  7. Do NOT produce false precision. Brackets only.

$ARGUMENTS

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 28 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 05bbd7e0a100

Subscribe to this mod's changes

estimate is a command published in the GitHub repository cdeust/ai-architect-mcp-codebase (4 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 180 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.