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

Trust 80%Fully autonomousfail · 0 retriesCompare

Estimated cost: $0.05
Wall time: 13s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Fail

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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 2151324071). 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 0.69 (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: $0.054627. Score: 1/4. 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: $0.05
Wall time: 13s
Human step-ins: 0
Turns: 4

Model usage
Model	Input tok	Output tok	Cost
AClaude Sonnet 5.5anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on	78,075	1,413	$0.05

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: balances tenure_accrual cap carryover
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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  "permission_denials": [],
  "terminal_reason": "completed",
  "fast_mode_state": "off",
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  "subagent_stats": {
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  "api_error_status": null,
  "result": "I wrote `out/balances.json` with balances, accrued hours and forfeited hours for all 13 employees. I haven't checked any of the figures against an independent calculation.\n\n- **Balances on 2026-03-31:** these range from 98.50 (P442) to 160.00 (P434 and P438, both at the cap).\n- **Forfeitures:** 12 of the 13 employees forfeited hours at year end. P410 forfeited 91.23, and P414, P434 and P450 each forfeited 120.00. P418 is the only one who didn't forfeit.\n\nYour spec didn't cover two cases, so I made these calls:\n- **Negative balances:** leave is subtracted even if it would take a balance below zero. This didn't affect any employee, because every running balance stayed positive.\n- **Accrual near the cap:** the hours added are limited to the room left under the cap, so `accrued` counts only what was actually added.",
  "ttft_ms": 1839,
  "type": "result",
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  "uuid": "[REDACTED]",
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  "time_to_request_ms": 233,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 1009,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]