From the article:

> For comparison: the previous plan was expected to take at least five years and estimated to cost roughly $6M.

If that's an estimate from an LLM, those have always been way off for me. I'm constantly amazed whenever something that an agent estimates would take weeks ends up being completed in an hour.

The LLM is reasoning about estimates from its training data... which is to say, from human engineering timescales.

I suspect the labs could improve the models such that they are estimating these sorts of things but they don't prioritize doing so (or perhaps RLHF selects it away) because, as you say, it feels amazing to do a week's worth of work in an hour.