There is very little chance that what you are working on has never been done before. Most likely, you are writing simple code to do simple things. These things can be broken down into simple tasks, and these simple tasks can be estimated.
Unless you are working on ChatGPT-6, i assure you, you can definitely estimate how long things will take. your estimates will not be perfect, but they will be good approximations for guiding development.
Even OpenAI by now probably is pretty good at estimating how long the next ChatGPT version will take to develop, since they've done it 4-5 times already.
Alway always distrust someone who says "we are doing things that have never been done before". At the very bleeding edge (OpenAI, SpaceX), you are iterating on something that has been done many times before, but with a small innovation.
Code is infinitely copyable. If it has been done before it can just be copied, hence the time it takes is 0. If it takes more than 0 then what you are doing is actually something else entirely, like gluing said code to something else for the first time.
If it is not the first time, then you already have the code and hence the time it takes is 0.
There are cases where code is similar to code you've written before or you cannot just copy the old one due to licensing constraints. In this case estimation is easy, somewhere between an hour to a day or two.
Anything larger can be broken down to hour to day or two chunks since it has been done before.
All great, except this last case simply doesn't exist for the type of work that I do. And that is true for many people, software is extremely unpredictable because the stuff you need to build on top of might as well be quicksand.
I don't think the folks that say this usually mean "never done before" in the way that you are saying.
"never done before" in my experience usually translates to "this combination of things doesn't have precedence internally [to the team or company], so I have to figure out how to glue all of these parts I don't understand together".
Unless you are working on ChatGPT-6, i assure you, you can definitely estimate how long things will take. your estimates will not be perfect, but they will be good approximations for guiding development.
Even OpenAI by now probably is pretty good at estimating how long the next ChatGPT version will take to develop, since they've done it 4-5 times already.
Alway always distrust someone who says "we are doing things that have never been done before". At the very bleeding edge (OpenAI, SpaceX), you are iterating on something that has been done many times before, but with a small innovation.