I don't completely agree. Estimation is nontrivial, but not necessarily a random guess. Teams of human engineers have been doing this for decades -- not always with great success, but better than random. Deciding whether to put an intern or your best staff engineer on a problem is a challenge known to any engineering manager and TPM.

That's why you split tasks and do project management 101.

That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again.

When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc.

We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of those problems". But they're often involved in evaluation/scoping down/breakdown of problem/supervising/correcting/etc.

There's tons of analogies and decades of industry experience to apply here.