AI didn't kill software estimation. It moved the uncertainty somewhere new. Your best-case number got really better, which feels great. Your worst-case number got much harder to pin down. And the middle, the number you actually quote to clients, got wobblier than ever. That's not a reason to abandon three-point estimation. It's the reason to lean on it harder.
Every project starts the same, someone needs a number. Doesn't matter if it's a client waiting on a proposal or your own team sizing up the next feature for sprint planning.
How long will this take, and what will it cost. Before I write a line of code, before I know half of what I'll run into, I have to commit to a figure. Sometimes that figure goes into an offer and eventually a contract. Sometimes it goes into a sprint plan, or a roadmap slide someone already showed to a VP. Get it wrong on the low side and you eat the difference, whether that's your margin or your team's next few weekends. Get it wrong on the high side and you lose the deal, or you watch the feature get bumped for something that promised to ship faster.
For years I've done this with three-point estimation. It's an old, boring, reliable technique (known as PERT). Lately I've been wondering whether it still holds up now that AI writes a big chunk of the code.
