Every AI agent hallucinates timelines

I spent years in ceramics before I wrote a line of code. Glaze chemistry is all math — silica, alumina, fluxes — and the difference between a celadon and a catastrophe is a fraction of a molar ratio. The kiln doesn't care about your intention. That taught me something I never forgot: "you can't quantify that" is a starting point, not a conclusion.

So when AI agents started confidently saying "that'll take six hours" — six hours of what? — it hit the same nerve.

There's no ground truth. No calibration. The agent's sense of time has nothing to do with how humans move through work. It's a number pulled from nothing, delivered with total confidence.

I built Epoch for the same reason I used to calculate thermal expansion coefficients for fun. Because "it's just a gut feel" is almost always someone admitting they don't want to look at the math.

MCP server, CLI, REST API. 24 tools across 5 layers: PERT, Monte Carlo, COCOMO II, critical path analysis, reference class forecasting. It tracks estimate vs. actual over time and self-corrects.

The loop is simple:

Agent asks Epoch for an estimate
Epoch returns a calibrated range — a distribution, not a single number
Agent does the work
You feed the actual time back in
Epoch adjusts. Every project that reports back makes every other project better.

What the commit history looks like

207 commits. 3 days. Here's how it broke down:

Day one — 50 commits. Foundation. Service architecture, tool layer, estimation engine. The bones.

Day two — 76 commits. Heavy construction. PERT network builder, Monte Carlo simulation engine, COCOMO II calibration. The math got real.

Day three — 81 commits. Polish and ship. v0.2.0. 870+ tests passing. Service score: 97/100.

73 features. 50 fixes. 20 docs. 17 test files. Fix-to-feature ratio of 0.68:1 — meaning for every feature, there was roughly seven-tenths of a fix. That's a healthy loop. Build, break, fix, ship.

I'm neurodivergent. I don't naturally estimate time the way most people do. Most neurodivergent people don't. So I externalize it. Epoch is one more system that does the estimation for me — built for agents this time, but the impulse is the same one that made me calculate thermal expansion coefficients for fun.

Same pattern, every time. Find the thing people say is unquantifiable. Build the system that quantifies it. Ship it.

I'm working on something that pulls all of this together. The biggest thing I've built. Not ready to show it yet — but every project I've made has been leading to it.

Epoch: github.com/KyaniteLabs/Epoch | npm: @puenteworks/epoch

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