Provide an estimated Bob Coins cost before running a task

Before starting a Bob task, users should be able to see an estimate of how many Bob Coins the operation is expected to consume.

Today, the actual cost of a complex task can be difficult for a user to anticipate. This becomes particularly important when Bob is used for larger activities such as code analysis, application modernization, refactoring, documentation, or multi-step development tasks.

Bob could provide an indication such as:

Estimated cost: approximately 50–70 Bob Coins

The estimate would not need to be exact. A range or cost category could already provide useful guidance.

For tasks where the final cost depends heavily on the amount of code or the number of iterations, Bob could progressively refine the estimate once the scope has been analysed.

Business value

Providing cost visibility before execution would:

help users manage their Bob Coins consumption;
avoid unexpected consumption on large tasks;
allow teams to compare alternative approaches before launching an operation;
make it easier for organizations to forecast Bob usage and budgets;
encourage users to use Bob more confidently rather than avoiding complex operations because the expected cost is unknown.

Bob already optimizes model selection behind the scenes. Providing an estimated cost before execution would make this optimization much more visible and actionable for users.

Needed By

Yesterday (Let's go already!)

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Provide an estimated Bob Coins cost before running a task