effort

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

Effort Estimator Instructions

Analyze the issue content (title, body, and any context or quality assessment) to estimate the effort required to implement a fix or feature.

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: Debugging useState/useEffect/useReducer bugs, 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 Refactors: Changes that span across packages/cli and packages/core to pass new data models or telemetry state. LARGE (3+ days):
• Platform-Specific Complexities (PTY/Signals): Any issue involving node-pty, child_process.spawn, OS-level shell behavior (Windows vs Linux vs macOS), 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.
• 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.