rdm-estimate

name	rdm-estimate
description	Rate each phase's difficulty and assign a model tier from its body
allowed-tools	["Read","Bash","Glob","Grep"]

Estimate the difficulty of one or more rdm phases. $ARGUMENTS is either a roadmap slug (estimate every phase in the roadmap) or <roadmap-slug> <phase-number> (estimate a single phase).

IMPORTANT: This is the rdm source repo. Always run cargo build first, then use ./target/debug/rdm — never bare rdm. If you modify any rdm source, cargo build again before running it.

Steps

1. Parse arguments: read $ARGUMENTS. If only a roadmap slug is given, estimate every phase in it; if a phase number follows the slug, estimate just that one phase.
2. List the phases: ./target/debug/rdm phase list --roadmap <slug> --project rdm. The output shows each phase's number, stem, status, and current difficulty.
3. Select phases to estimate: keep only phases whose difficulty is unset. Skip any phase that already has a difficulty — it was either estimated on an earlier run or set deliberately by a human, and must be left untouched.
4. For each selected phase, in order:
   1. Read the body: ./target/debug/rdm phase show <stem-or-number> --roadmap <slug> --project rdm.
   2. Rate its difficulty as one of trivial, easy, moderate, or hard, based on the scope, risk, and breadth of the work the body describes. Write a one-line justification for the rating.
   3. Record the justification by appending a short ## Estimate note to the phase body. Take the existing body from step 4.1, append a section like:

      ## Estimate
      
      <difficulty> — <one-line justification>
      

      then write the difficulty and the updated body in a single update. update does not read stdin, so pass the body with --body: capture the full body into a shell variable with a quoted heredoc (which keeps backticks, $, and punctuation literal), then pass --body "$body":

      body=$(cat <<'EOF'
      <full phase body, with the appended ## Estimate section>
      EOF
      )
      ./target/debug/rdm phase update <stem-or-number> --difficulty <difficulty> --body "$body" --no-edit --roadmap <slug> --project rdm
      

      Do not pass --model: the model tier is derived automatically from the difficulty (trivial/easy → small, moderate → medium, hard → large).
5. Report what was estimated: list each phase with its assigned difficulty, the derived model tier, and the one-line justification. Note any phases that were skipped because they already had a difficulty.

Guidelines

• Skipping is the override mechanism. A phase that already has a difficulty is never re-rated, so re-running this skill is idempotent and never overwrites a human-set (or previously estimated) value.
• To force a re-estimate of a phase, a human first clears its difficulty (./target/debug/rdm phase update <phase> --clear-difficulty --no-edit --roadmap <slug> --project rdm); the next run will then pick it up.
• Rate from the body's described scope, not from how the work feels to implement: a one-line change is trivial/easy; a self-contained feature is moderate; cross-cutting or high-risk work is hard.
• Keep the justification to a single line — it explains the rating, it is not a plan.
• Never set --model by hand here; the difficulty→tier mapping is authoritative.