Agent’s Accurate Guess, Flawed Polling Method | Generated by AI
Looking at the transcript, the agent’s estimates were systematically wrong — but in a revealing way.
The agent locked onto a rate early (~270 KB/s, then ~370 KB/s, then “~20MB/min”) and kept re-deriving an ETA from each snapshot. The problem: it never validated that the SCP was actually still running versus stalled, and its “~X min remaining” numbers don’t reconcile with each other.
Walk the actual data points:
114MB "~22 min remaining"
136MB
157MB "~15 min"
177MB "~15 min"
187MB
208MB "~13 min"
228MB "~12 min"
247MB "~11 min"
273MB "~10 min"
325MB "~7 min"
366MB "~5 min"
From 114→366MB the throughput is real and roughly steady. Fit it: ~252MB transferred across the polls. If each poll is ~60s (the wait proc 60.0s cadence), that’s ~11–12 polls ≈ 11–12 min for 252MB → ~21–22 MB/min, i.e. ~360 KB/s. So the rate estimate (“~20MB/min”) is actually correct and consistent.
The ETAs are where it goes wrong. At 114MB it said 22 min for the remaining 361MB → implies ~16MB/min. At 366MB it said 5 min for the remaining 109MB → implies ~22MB/min. The later estimates are right; the early one was pessimistic. But more importantly, the agent kept saying “I’ll stop checking every minute” and then checked every minute anyway — the estimates never actually drove behavior.
So: the rate guess is correct, the per-poll ETAs are noisy but converging toward the truth, and the transfer never finished in-frame (cut off at 366/475MB ≈ 77%). At the observed ~22MB/min, the remaining 109MB takes ~5 min — so its final guess (“~5 min left”) is the one that’s actually accurate.
The real failure isn’t the arithmetic, it’s the loop: polling ls -lh once a minute to babysit an SCP is a waste of ~15 agent-turns. The AI-native version is to not poll at all — let scp’s own progress meter or a single blocking wait do the job:
# instead of N× ssh ... ls -lh, just run scp in foreground with progress
scp root@<IP_ADDRESS>:/tmp/model.safetensors .
# or background it and wait once:
scp ... & SCP=$!; wait $SCP && echo "done"
Or if it’s a pull from a remote you can’t watch directly, poll on completion, not on size:
# block until file size stops changing, then report — one logical op, not 15
ssh root@<IP_ADDRESS> '
prev=0
while :; do
cur=$(stat -c%s /tmp/model.safetensors 2>/dev/null || echo 0)
[ "$cur" = "$prev" ] && [ "$cur" -gt 0 ] && break
prev=$cur; sleep 30
done
echo "stable at $cur bytes"
'
Bottom line: the guess (rate ~20MB/min, final ETA ~5min) is correct; the method (one-minute manual polling with re-narrated ETAs) is wrong and burned context for no information gain.