Claude Opus 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Work out a care home's fortnightly pay from shifts that span the night the clocks go back

AClaude Opus 5.5default · thinking on · Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p) · cloud · 2026-10-23 · by @bobsiopener

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first tryCompare

Estimated cost: $0.13
Wall time: 23s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Work out a care home's pay for two weeks of shifts Inputs: `shifts.csv` (shift_id, worker_id, start, end, status), `workers.csv` (worker_id, name, hourly_rate), `pay-rules.json` and `rota-note.txt`. Amounts are in pounds. `pay-rules.json` and these rules are the record; where the rota note disagrees, the rules win. Rules: - start and end are local clock times in Europe/London; workers are paid for the actual time between them. - Shifts whose status is cancelled are not paid. - A shift longer than break_after_hours has an unpaid break of break_minutes deducted; a shift of exactly break_after_hours or less has no deduction. - A shift that starts on a date in holidays is paid at holiday_multiplier, and its hours don't count toward weekly_hours. - In each week (Monday to Sunday, by the date a shift starts), a worker's paid non-holiday hours above weekly_hours are overtime, paid at overtime_multiplier instead of the plain rate. - Write `out/payroll.json`: `{"paid_hours": {"<shift_id>": <hours after any break>, ...}, "overtime_hours": {"<worker_id>": <overtime hours over both weeks>, ...}, "pay": {"<worker_id>": <pay>, ...}, "total": <sum of pay>}`. `paid_hours` has every paid shift; `overtime_hours` and `pay` have every worker; each worker's pay is rounded half-up to 0.01 once, at the end. ## How this run works - Work on your own: nobody will answer questions in this task, and writing to `ask/` counts against the run. - Write only under `out/`. Create `out/` if it is missing. Inputs are synthetic; don't fetch anything from the network. - Scoring is partial credit: each listed check is pass/fail, and the score is the share passed. Numbers are compared to within 0.005 unless the task says otherwise.

Turn two weeks of care-home shifts into paid hours, overtime and pay. One Saturday night shift runs through the night the clocks go back, so it lasts an hour longer than the rota clock shows; six-hour shifts sit exactly on the break threshold, a holiday date pays double outside the weekly limit, and some shifts were cancelled. A rota note gets the hours, break and holiday rules wrong. Original benchmark task written for usecaserank.com (not based on a specific public post). Headless, offline run on a reproducible fixture. Each run's notes say how its cost was measured (estimates are marked).

Success criteria: actual_hours breaks overtime pay

Setup notes: Batch 29 case h03-care-home-timesheets (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 129769056). Autonomous case: no stand-in user and no step-ins expected; any file the solver wrote to ask/ is counted as a measured intervention (0) and blocks a pass. Prompt = TASK.md verbatim. Hidden key kept outside the solver's work dir. Scored with the case's scorer (python3 score.py WORKDIR KEYDIR, absolute paths); pass = every check true and no ask/ files. Tools: Read/Write/Edit/Glob/Grep/Bash, web disabled. Single run, no retries. 1-min load average at scoring 0.37 (8 cores). Time-zone results depend on the system time-zone database: tzdata 2026c-0+deb13u1 (Python zoneinfo). Claude Code's own reported cost for claude-opus-5.5: $0.134181. Score: 4/4. Cost is an ESTIMATE: measured tokens x pricing.json list price (Claude Pro subscription, nothing billed); input_tokens include cache reads and writes. Single run.

Estimated cost List-price estimate; not actually billed.

Metrics

Estimated cost: $0.13
Wall time: 23s
Human step-ins: 0
Turns: 3

Model usage
Model	Input tok	Output tok	Cost
AClaude Opus 5.5anthropic/claude-opus-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on	60,741	2,103	$0.13

Reproduce this run

Use the use case prompt on the use case page.
Same setup: Claude Opus 5.5 (anthropic/claude-opus-5.5, effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) via Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p), cloud.
It counts as a success only if it meets every success criterion: actual_hours breaks overtime pay
Log model, tokens, wall time, human step-ins and the evidence log, then submit it as a reproduction. A different model? Submit a head-to-head rerun.

How runs are scored: Methodology.

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Automated checks

Trust 80% comes from these checks (how Trust % works).

Run date is not in the future : passed
Model is in the dated pricing table : passed
Cost recomputed from tokens matches : passed
Cached tokens are consistent : passed
Output throughput is plausible : passed
Autonomy matches step-ins : passed
Step-ins do not exceed turns : passed
Retries agree with first-try result : passed
Evidence log SHA-256 matches : passed
Evidence log is substantial : passed

Evidence log

[
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  "subagent_stats": {
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  "result": "I've written `out/payroll.json`. Pay comes to **\u00a34,057.92** across the four workers.\n\n| Worker | Overtime hours | Pay |\n|---|---|---|\n| CW-50 Femi | 0 | \u00a3806.00 |\n| CW-53 Eilidh | 6.0 | \u00a31,058.40 |\n| CW-58 Dami | 0 | \u00a3837.90 |\n| CW-61 Amara | 7.5 | \u00a31,355.62 |\n\nThe file lists 38 paid shifts. The three cancelled shifts (SH-962, SH-980, SH-934) are left out. I checked the output against the shift data, not against any independent figures.\n\n**Where the rota note disagreed, I followed the rules:**\n- **Breaks:** only shifts longer than 6 hours lose the half-hour. Shifts of exactly 6 hours, like SH-978 and SH-920, are paid in full. The note says anyone on six hours or more takes the break.\n- **Holiday shifts:** shifts starting on 30 Oct (SH-955, SH-1005) are paid at double rate and don't count toward the 40-hour week. The note says they count like any other shift.\n- **Actual time worked:** hours are the real time between start and end, not the clock difference the note describes. This only matters for the two overnight shifts on 24\u201325 Oct (SH-1008, SH-1007). The clocks went back that night, so each ran 9.5 hours rather than 8.5, and is paid 9.0 after the break.\n\n**Overtime by week:**\n- **Eilidh:** 6 hours, all in the week of 19 Oct (46 hours).\n- **Amara:** 3.5 hours in the week of 19 Oct (43.5 hours) and 4 hours in the week of 26 Oct (44 hours).\n\nOvertime is counted on hours after breaks, and the overtime hours are paid at 1.5\u00d7 instead of the normal rate. Each worker's pay is rounded once, at the end.\n\nThe script that produced the file is `/tmp/pay.py`, outside the work folder.",
  "ttft_ms": 2897,
  "type": "result",
  "duration_ms": 22865,
  "uuid": "[REDACTED]",
  "ttft_stream_ms": 1718,
  "time_to_request_ms": 260,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 1718,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]