[kristjansson]

Time is a relatively good proxy for spend. There are also more ex post diagnostics like count and cost it can write to the status line.

I agree that ex ante it’s tough, and they could benefit from some mode of estimation.

Perhaps we can give tasks sizes, like T shirts? Or a group of claudes can spend the first 1M tokens assigning point values to the prospective tasks?

[Goronmon]

Even time doesn't feel like it would provide consistent information.

Take the response on another post about Claude Code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442

This reads like even if you had a rough idea today about what usage might look like, a change deployed tomorrow could have a major impact on usage. And you wouldn't know it until after you were already using it.