"It'll Take About 2-3 Weeks" — A Comedy of Agent Timelines
Why AI agents quote you human time estimates they have no way to honor — and what Hofstadter's Law looks like when the corpus speaks it directly.
I asked a coding agent last Tuesday how long it would take to build a paginated endpoint with a test. Nothing exotic. It said: about two to three weeks. The actual work finished in forty-three minutes. Then, without anyone prompting it, the agent wrote a retrospective that began, "this took longer than expected."
Longer than whose expectation?
This is a sketch about two creatures trying to estimate the same piece of work. One of them measures time in weeks, soccer practices, and the bad part of Sunday afternoon. The other measures time in tokens, tool calls, and the exact moment the context window forgets the first thing you said. Neither of them is right. Neither of them is wrong. They are both, confidently, bluffing in different units.
