estimation

estimation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents. It costs 66 tokens per session (579 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An estimation method for making rough, defensible ranges when an important number is unknown or looks too exact. It uses order-of-magnitude reasoning, bounds, and capacity analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking feasibility, estimating capacity, testing whether a system could handle much more load, and sanity-checking claimed figures.
Why use it?
It helps you make decisions without treating guesses as precise measurements or waiting for data that is not available.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the zetetic-team-subagents plugin — 16 skills, 2 commands, 23 agents, 6 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Checking feasibility, estimating capacity, testing whether a system could handle much more load, and sanity-checking claimed figures.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/estimation
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.

Any agent
npx skills add cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents --skill estimation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install zetetic-team-subagents, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 2 commands, 23 agents, 6 hooks, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for estimation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/estimation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/estimation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/estimation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/estimation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 579 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00066 $0.00579
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.00290
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00116
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00058

Measured 8d ago against content hash cd24ad55e918, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

estimation 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 8d 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.

skills/estimation/SKILL.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Estimation

Problem shape: a quantity is needed for a decision, but there is no measurement — or there is a single number with false precision and no bracket. The move is order-of-magnitude decomposition, two-sided bounds, and limits derived before methods are chosen.

Relevant geniuses

Agent Use when
fermi decision blocked by missing data; single number with no bracket; feasibility check before committing resources; sanity-check a claimed figure
erlang capacity planning, queue sizing, arrival-vs-service balance, latency exploding near saturation (Little's law audits)
thompson "will this design survive 10x scale?" — surface-to-volume and allometric scale-break analysis
laplace priors need eliciting; estimates need updating as evidence arrives; forecaster calibration is unknown
carnot efficiency claims with no derived theoretical limit; "where is the irreversible loss?"
erdos existence/threshold questions on large combinatorial spaces — probabilistic method instead of enumeration

Invocation

  1. Pick the best-fit agent above. If two or more fit, run tools/genius-invoker.sh route "<problem>" and take the top ranked match.
  2. Load it: tools/genius-invoker.sh invoke <agent> "<problem>", then read agents/genius/<agent>.md in full.
  3. Apply the agent's <workflow> step by step and answer in its <output-format>. Every estimate ships as a two-sided bracket with the dominant uncertainty named — never a bare point value.
  4. Cross-check: two independent decompositions must agree within ×10 before the estimate is used for a decision (fermi's sanity-check shape).
  5. If no shape above matches, use a standard team agent instead.

Refuse when

  • The requester wants a precise number a bracket cannot honestly provide — say what measurement would be needed instead.
  • The estimate would be quoted without its bounds.

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 lines

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. 8d ago First seen · 47 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A cd24ad55e918

Subscribe to this mod's changes

estimation is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents (7 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 579 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. 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.

Related

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