Claude Opus 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Work out shift pay across the autumn clock change with breaks, night premium, weekly overtime and a holiday

AClaude Opus 5.5default · thinking on · Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p) · cloud · 2026-10-24 · by @bobsiopener

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first tryCompare

Estimated cost: $0.20
Wall time: 50s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Work out shift pay across the autumn clock change, with breaks, night premium, weekly overtime and a holiday Inputs: `shifts.csv` (employee, start_local, end_local, break_min), `rates.json` (base hourly rate per employee) and `holidays.json`. Times are local wall-clock times in America/New_York (the clocks went back from 02:00 to 01:00 on 2026-11-01). Everything is synthetic. These rules are the record; where `payroll-note.txt` disagrees, the rules win. Rules: - A shift's span is the real elapsed time between start_local and end_local, converted with the time zone's rules (not the difference of the clock readings). - Unpaid break: break_min, but at least 30 minutes when the span is more than 6 hours. The break comes off the end of the shift: the last break minutes of the span are not worked. - Classify each worked minute by the local wall-clock time at that real minute: night when the local hour is 22, 23 or 0-5; holiday when the local date is in holidays.json. - Weekly overtime: a shift belongs to the pay week (Monday to Sunday) of its start date. Worked minutes beyond 2400 in a pay week are overtime, taken from the chronologically last worked minutes of that week. - Pay per minute at base/60 × multiplier: 1 normally, 1.5 for overtime, 2 for holiday minutes (the higher multiplier applies, never both), plus a night premium of 0.25 × base/60 for every night minute on top. Gross is rounded half-up to the cent per employee. - Write `out/pay.json`: `{"<employee>": {"worked_hours": <h>, "overtime_hours": <h>, "night_hours": <h>, "holiday_hours": <h>, "gross": <dollars>}, ...}` with hours = minutes / 60 rounded half-up to 0.01. ## 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.

Pay three employees for two weeks of shifts that straddle the night the clocks go back. Shift lengths are real elapsed time, not clock differences, a minimum break applies to longer shifts and comes off the end, night and holiday minutes are classified by local time minute by minute, weekly overtime is the last minutes of each pay week, holiday and overtime multipliers don't stack, and the night premium sits on top. A payroll note gets the clock-change, break, overtime and stacking 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: clock_change_and_breaks night_minutes weekly_overtime holiday_minutes gross

Setup notes: Batch 33 case tj02-shift-pay-across-clock-change (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 1487627659). 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 0.18 (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: $0.201379. Score: 5/5. 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: $0.20
Wall time: 50s
Human step-ins: 0
Turns: 6

Model usage
Model	Input tok	Output tok	Cost
AClaude Opus 5.5anthropic/claude-opus-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on	128,757	4,087	$0.20

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: clock_change_and_breaks night_minutes weekly_overtime holiday_minutes gross
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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  "result": "I checked every shift by hand and found one slip in my own arithmetic, not in the script. The 11\u201105 shift lasts 6h15, which is over 6 hours, so it gets the 30\u2011minute minimum break. The results are in `out/pay.json`:\n\n| Employee | Worked h | Overtime h | Night h | Holiday h | Gross |\n|---|---|---|---|---|---|\n| Blake | 54.92 | 0.00 | 16.75 | 0.00 | $1814.50 |\n| Casey | 73.08 | 0.00 | 15.75 | 0.00 | $2369.93 |\n| Drew | 81.00 | 1.00 | 31.25 | 12.75 | $2830.19 |\n\nHow the main rules played out:\n- **Clock change:** the shifts that run through the night of 31 Oct\u20131 Nov were measured in real elapsed time, so each one counts an extra hour. Drew's 18:30\u201305:30 shift is 12 hours, not 11. No start or end time fell in the repeated 01:00\u201302:00 hour, so none of them was ambiguous.\n- **Breaks:** each break came off the end of its shift. Any shift longer than 6 hours had its break raised to at least 30 minutes.\n- **Overtime:** only Drew went over 2,400 minutes in a pay week. The week of 2 Nov came to 2,460, giving 60 overtime minutes, taken from the end of the 6 Nov shift. The previous week came to exactly 2,400, so it has no overtime.\n- **Holiday:** the holiday (2026\u201111\u201104) is paid at double, with no overtime rate added on top. Only Drew worked that day. Night minutes earn an extra 0.25 \u00d7 the hourly base rate on top of whatever rate applies.\n\nWhere `payroll-note.txt` disagreed with the rules, I followed the rules as you instructed. The note says to subtract clock times, take breaks off the start, count the first hours over 40 as overtime, and pay overtime and holiday rates together.\n\nThe script is `/tmp/pay/calc.py`, outside the work folder, and `out/pay.json` is the only file it writes.",
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 }
]