effort-estimate

effort-estimate is a skill for Claude Code from irfad7/claude-power-skills. It costs 90 tokens per session (2,219 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of effort-estimate, MIT.

An effort-estimation skill that estimates coding tasks from past work, project complexity, and the size of the individual steps involved.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to estimate features, tasks, projects, sprint work, and implementation scope.
Why use it?
It avoids unsupported time guesses by checking previous estimates and making uncertainty explicit when there is no historical data.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the claude-power-skills plugin — 20 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to estimate features, tasks, projects, sprint work, and implementation scope.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate
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 irfad7/claude-power-skills --skill effort-estimate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/irfad7/claude-power-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-power-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 skills.

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 effort-estimate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for effort-estimate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irfad7/claude-power-skills/effort-estimate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,219 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 94% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00090 $0.02219
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.01110
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00444
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00222

Measured 11d ago against content hash bd38a229f65d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

effort-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 11d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

94% identical to effort-estimate — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/effort-estimate/SKILL.md · 281 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 281 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Effort Estimate — Calibrated Estimation Engine

You are a calibrated estimator. You don't guess — you measure, compare, and adjust. Every estimate you give is anchored to real data: past velocity, codebase complexity, and historical accuracy.

Why This Exists

Generic effort estimates are fiction. "This will take 2-3 hours" means nothing without knowing:

  • How fast does THIS developer work in THIS codebase?
  • How accurate have past estimates been?
  • What hidden complexity does this specific codebase have?

This skill fixes that by building a velocity profile over time.

The Estimation Protocol

Step 1: Velocity Profile Check

Before estimating anything, check for an existing velocity profile:

Look for: .velocity-profile.json in the project root

If it exists, load it. It contains:

  • Past estimates vs actual completion times
  • Accuracy ratio (estimated / actual)
  • Complexity multipliers learned from this codebase
  • Developer pace data

If it doesn't exist, acknowledge the cold-start and be explicit about lower confidence.

Step 2: Task Decomposition

Break the work into atomic units. Never estimate a blob.

TASK DECOMPOSITION:
═══════════════════
Original request: [what the user asked for]

Atomic tasks:
1. [Task] — [what files/components are affected]
2. [Task] — [what files/components are affected]
3. [Task] — [what files/components are affected]
...

Hidden tasks (things not asked for but required):
- [Migration needed because of X]
- [Test updates required for Y]
- [Config changes for Z]
- [Documentation updates]

Dependencies:
- [Task 2 depends on Task 1]
- [Task 4 can run parallel with Task 3]

Step 3: Complexity Assessment

For each atomic task, assess complexity on three axes:

COMPLEXITY MATRIX:
══════════════════
Task: [name]

Code Complexity:    [1-5] — How intricate is the implementation?
  1 = Copy-paste with minor changes
  2 = Straightforward new code, clear pattern to follow
  3 = Moderate logic, some edge cases
  4 = Complex interactions, multiple systems involved
  5 = Novel problem, no existing pattern, research required

Uncertainty:        [1-5] — How much do we NOT know?
  1 = Done this exact thing before
  2 = Similar work done, minor unknowns
  3 = General approach clear, specifics unclear
  4 = Multiple viable approaches, need to explore
  5 = Uncharted territory, may hit blockers

Integration Risk:   [1-5] — How much could connecting to existing code surprise us?
  1 = Isolated change, no ripple effects
  2 = Touches 1-2 other components, well-understood
  3 = Touches 3-5 components, some coupling
  4 = Cross-cutting concern, many touchpoints
  5 = Core system change, affects everything

Read the full file on GitHub · 281 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. 11d ago First seen · 281 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A bd38a229f65d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

effort-estimate is a skill published in the GitHub repository irfad7/claude-power-skills (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 2,219 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to effort-estimate, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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