Claude Sonnet 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Bill a hotel's group bookings across a mid-month rate rise, weekend nights, cancellations with time-zone offsets and a city-tax cap

AClaude Sonnet 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: $0.06
Wall time: 14s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Bill a hotel's November group bookings Inputs: `bookings.csv` (booking_id, guest, company, room_type, arrive, depart, guests, status, cancelled_at, checkout_time), `rates.csv` (room_type, from_date, weekday, weekend), `hotel.json` and `front-desk-note.txt`. Amounts are in pounds. `hotel.json`, `rates.csv` and these rules are the record; where the front-desk note disagrees, the rules win. Rules: - Each night of a stay (arrive up to the night before depart) is charged at the rate in force on that night's date (the row with the latest from_date on or before it); nights falling on a weekday listed in weekend_nights use the weekend rate. - A booking whose company is in corporates (ignoring letter case) gets corporate_discount_pct off its room charge or cancellation charge only, the discount rounded half-up to 0.01 per booking. - A stayed booking whose checkout_time is later than late_checkout_after pays late_fee; checking out exactly at late_checkout_after is free. - A cancelled booking is free if cancelled_at (which carries its own UTC offset) is at least free_cancel_hours before checkin_time on the arrival date in the hotel's timezone; otherwise, and for every no_show, the first night's room rate is charged. - City tax for a stayed booking = guests x nights x city_tax_per_person_night, counting at most city_tax_max_nights nights. - Write `out/billing.json`: `{"room": {"<booking_id>": <room charge after discount>, ...}, "late_fees": {...}, "cancellation_charges": {...}, "city_tax": {...}, "total": <sum of everything>}`. `room` and `city_tax` list every stayed booking; `late_fees` and `cancellation_charges` list only bookings charged one. ## 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.

Bill a month of hotel bookings night by night. Rates rise mid-month and Friday and Saturday nights are dearer, corporate names appear in mixed letter case, checkout exactly at 11:00 is free, cancellations carry their own UTC offsets and land either side of the 48-hour line, and city tax stops after five nights. A front-desk note gets the rate, time-zone and late-checkout 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: nightly_rates corporate_discount cancellations late_checkout city_tax_and_total

Setup notes: Batch 30 case o01-hotel-group-billing (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 1201124906). 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 0.74 (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-sonnet-5.5: $0.057383. 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: $0.06
Wall time: 14s
Human step-ins: 0
Turns: 3

Model usage
Model	Input tok	Output tok	Cost
AClaude Sonnet 5.5anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on	60,081	1,633	$0.06

Reproduce this run

Use the use case prompt on the use case page.
Same setup: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (anthropic/claude-sonnet-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: nightly_rates corporate_discount cancellations late_checkout city_tax_and_total
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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   "speed": "standard",
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  "modelUsage": {
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    "costUSD": 0.0573832,
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    "canonicalModel": "claude-sonnet-5-5",
    "provider": "firstParty",
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  "permission_denials": [],
  "terminal_reason": "completed",
  "fast_mode_state": "off",
  "fast_mode_disabled_reason": "sdk_opt_in_required",
  "subagent_stats": {
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  "subtype": "success",
  "api_error_status": null,
  "result": "I wrote `out/billing.json`. The total is \u00a36,877.40.\n\n- **Included:** 12 stayed bookings with room charges and city tax, 2 late fees (HB-98 and HB-115, both checking out at 12:30), and 1 cancellation charge.\n- **Cancellation charge:** HB-97 is a no-show and pays its first night. That is \u00a3139.00 at the weekend rate less the 10% corporate discount, so \u00a3125.10.\n- **Free cancellations:** HB-118, HB-120 and HB-103 were all cancelled at least 48 hours before check-in, so they pay nothing. I used 15:00 UK time on the arrival date and each booking's own UTC offset.\n- **Where I followed the rules over the front-desk note:** each night is charged at the rate for that night's date, not the arrival night's rate, and checkout at exactly 11:00 is free.\n\nI haven't opened or spot-checked the output beyond the printed totals.",
  "ttft_ms": 2135,
  "type": "result",
  "duration_ms": 13211,
  "uuid": "[REDACTED]",
  "ttft_stream_ms": 1297,
  "time_to_request_ms": 369,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 1297,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]