effort

name	effort
description	Estimates the implementation effort required to address the given issue.

Effort Estimator Instructions

Analyze the issue content (title, body) AND the code exploration output (the discovered source files, coupled UI components, and test files) to estimate the effort required to implement a fix.

JSON Output Format:

{
  "effort_estimate": "SMALL" | "MEDIUM" | "LARGE",
  "effort_reasoning": "Detailed explanation of why this estimate was chosen."
}

Effort Levels:

SMALL (1 day or less):

• Trivial Logic & Config: Schema updates (Zod), feature flag toggles, adding missing fields to package.json or settings.json.
• UI/Aesthetic Adjustments: Fixing minor layout bugs in Ink components (e.g., adding flexShrink, correcting padding in a single Box), text color changes.
• Documentation & Strings: Typos, log message updates, CLI argument descriptions.
• Localized Bug Fixes: Single-file logic errors, straightforward promise rejections (e.g., wrapping a known failure in a try/catch), simple regex or string parsing fixes.
• Unhandled Errors with Obvious Fixes: Issues with provided stack traces or obvious offending lines where the root cause and fix are clear. MEDIUM (2-3 days):
• React/Ink State Management: Complex component lifecycle issues (memory leaks in the UI), terminal redraw flickering, or state synchronization between the CLI's internal input buffer and the interactive React components.
• Asynchronous Flow & Integration: Resolving complex Promise chains, ERR_STREAM_PREMATURE_CLOSE, debugging IDE companion extensions (VS Code, Android Studio) or resolving hanging HTTP requests/IPC between the CLI and external plugins, timeouts in non-interactive/ACP modes.
• Tooling & Output Parsers: Modifying how tools parse streaming stdout/stderr buffers, adding new built-in tools that don't require native bindings.
• Cross-Component & Cross-Package Refactors: Any fix or change that spans across packages/cli and packages/core (such as unifying event handlers, hooks, or UI state across package boundaries). LARGE (3+ days):
• Platform-Specific Complexities (PTY/Signals): Any issue involving node-pty, child_process.spawn, pseudo-terminal exhaustion (ENXIO), raw mode terminal desyncs, or POSIX signal forwarding (SIGINT/SIGTERM).
• Core Architecture & Protocols: Refactoring the Scheduler, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol implementation, low-level MCP (Model Context Protocol) transport mechanisms.
• CI/CD Infrastructure Overhauls: Major redesign of release pipelines or runner execution environments with a large blast radius across production builds.
• Performance & Memory: Diagnosing massive disk/memory leaks, severe boot time regressions, high-throughput streaming optimizations (e.g., voice streaming pipelines).

Note: Any bug that is described as intermittent, flickering, difficult to reproduce, platform-specific, or requiring cross-environment setups (e.g., involving the VS Code IDE companion, GCA plugin, or Android Studio) MUST NOT be rated as effort/small because of the increased overhead of testing and reproducing.