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Claude Opus 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Roll forward staff holiday balances with a tenure step-up, a balance cap, part-timers and a year-end carry-over limit

AClaude Opus 5.5default · thinking on · Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p) · cloud · 2026-10-21 · by @bobsiopener

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first try
Estimated cost
$0.12
Wall time
22s
Human step-ins
0
Outcome
Pass

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Summary

Exact prompt

# Roll forward holiday balances Inputs: `employees.csv` (hire date, FTE, opening balance in hours on 2025-10-01), `leave-taken.csv` and `pto-policy.json`. Work out every employee's balance on 2026-03-31, going through the twelve semi-monthly periods from 2025-10-01 in order (1st-15th, then 16th-month end). - In each period, first subtract approved leave dated in that period (leave with status `cancelled` doesn't count), then add that period's accrual. - Accrual = the policy's base hours for the employee's tenure on the last day of the period, times FTE, rounded to 2 decimals half-up. Tenure counts whole years since `hire_date`. - Accrual stops at the cap: never add more than would take the balance above `cap_hours`. - After the period ending 2025-12-31, any balance above `carryover_max_hours` is forfeited. Write `out/balances.json`: `{"balance": {"<employee_id>": <hours on 2026-03-31>, ...}, "accrued": {"<employee_id>": <hours accrued over the 12 periods>, ...}, "forfeited": {"<employee_id>": <hours forfeited at year end>, ... only employees who forfeited}}`. Hours to 2 decimals. ## 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.

Roll paid-time-off balances forward over twelve semi-monthly pay periods spanning a year end. Accrual depends on tenure at each period's end and on each person's FTE, stops at a balance cap, cancelled leave doesn't count, and only a limited balance carries into the new year. Ignoring the cap, the anniversary step-up or the carry-over limit each changes someone's balance. 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: balances tenure_accrual cap carryover

Setup notes: Batch 22 case x03-pto-accrual-balances (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 180720602). 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 0.45 (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: $0.118299. 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
$0.12
Wall time
22s
Human step-ins
0
Turns
3
Model usage
ModelInput tokOutput tokCost
AClaude Opus 5.5anthropic/claude-opus-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on57,6662,060$0.12

Reproduce this run

  1. Use the use case prompt on the use case page.
  2. 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.
  3. It counts as a success only if it meets every success criterion: balances tenure_accrual cap carryover
  4. 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

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Evidence log
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  "permission_denials": [],
  "terminal_reason": "completed",
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  "result": "I've written `out/balances.json` with the 2026-03-31 balance and the hours accrued over the 12 periods for all 13 employees. 11 of them forfeited hours at year end. To check the output, I worked through one employee by hand (P458); I didn't test the script any other way.\n\n| Employee | Balance 2026-03-31 | Accrued | Forfeited |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| P410 | 76.02 | 76.70 | 43.83 |\n| P414 | 70.00 | 60.00 | 20.81 |\n| P418 | 41.34 | 49.34 | 26.73 |\n| P422 | 54.00 | 60.00 | 108.31 |\n| P426 | 51.00 | 60.00 | \u2013 |\n| P430 | 72.02 | 80.04 | 102.04 |\n| P434 | 74.98 | 67.64 | 1.26 |\n| P438 | 56.52 | 80.04 | 20.33 |\n| P442 | 54.47 | 46.00 | \u2013 |\n| P446 | 70.00 | 60.00 | 52.90 |\n| P450 | 29.50 | 42.00 | 81.92 |\n| P454 | 85.00 | 90.00 | 85.10 |\n| P458 | 70.00 | 39.35 | 120.00 |\n\nThings that affect the numbers:\n- **Tenure changes mid-run:** an employee moves to the next accrual rate in the first period that ends after their hire anniversary. For example, P410 reaches 5 years on 2025-11-03, so the period ending 11-15 is the first at 6.67 hours.\n- **Cap:** P458 opened at 150.65 hours and hit the 160-hour cap after two accruals (5.00, then 4.35). They accrued nothing more until the year-end forfeiture cut them to 40, then accrued normally after that.\n- **Leave above the balance:** nothing stops leave from taking a balance below zero. A negative balance would just carry forward, though that's only an issue if it ever happens.\n\nThe script is in `/tmp/roll.py`, outside `out/`, so it can be rerun as `python3 -I /tmp/roll.py .` from the work folder.",
  "ttft_ms": 2706,
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  "time_to_request_ms": 254,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 1992,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]

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