Claude Sonnet 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Reconcile a laundromat's machine payments against its cycle log and work out refunds owed and takings

AClaude Sonnet 5.5default · thinking on · Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p) · cloud · 2026-10-26 · by @bobsiopener

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first tryCompare

Estimated cost: $0.06
Wall time: 17s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Reconcile a laundromat's machine payments against its cycle log and work out refunds owed and takings Inputs: `machines.csv` (machine_id, kind, price), `payments.csv` (pay_id, ts, machine_id, amount, method), `cycles.csv` (cycle_id, machine_id, start, minutes, end_reason), `counter-refunds.csv` (refund_id, pay_id, amount) and `period.json` (period_start, period_end, both dates included). Timestamps are the shop's local time, `YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS`. All machines, customers and payments are synthetic; amounts are in dollars. These rules are the shop's; where `attendant-notes.txt` disagrees, the rules win. Rules: - Matching: take the payments in ts order (then pay_id order). Each payment funds the earliest cycle on the same machine that starts at or after the payment's ts and no more than 5 minutes (300 seconds) after it, and that no earlier payment has already funded. A payment with no such cycle funds nothing; a cycle no payment funds is unpaid. - Refunds owed: a payment is owed back in full when it funds nothing, or when the cycle it funds has end_reason `power_cut`. A cycle that ended `door_opened` was stopped by the customer and is not refunded. A payment that already has a row in counter-refunds.csv is not owed again. - Faulty machines: a machine is flagged when it has 2 or more unpaid cycles in the period. - Takings: a payment's takings are its amount, minus any counter refund paid against it, minus the amount if it is owed back. Takings by machine and by day (the payment's ts date) are the sums of those takings. - Write `out/reconciliation.json`: `{"refunds_owed": [<sorted pay_ids>], "refunds_owed_total": <dollars>, "unpaid_cycles": [<sorted cycle_ids>], "faulty_machines": [<sorted machine_ids>], "takings_by_machine": {"<machine_id>": <dollars>, ...}, "takings_by_day": {"<YYYY-MM-DD>": <dollars>, ...}}`. - Roll-ups: Machines in machines.csv with no payments are included at 0. Days in the period with no payments are included at 0. ## 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.

Match a week of a synthetic self-service laundromat's card and coin payments to the machines' cycle log under a stated rule: each payment funds the earliest unfunded cycle on that machine starting within five minutes. Work out which payments are owed back (nothing started, or a power cut), which cycles ran unpaid, which machines look faulty, and net takings per machine and per day. A payment exactly five minutes ahead, a double payment already refunded at the counter and cycles stopped by the customer are decoys. The prompt says idle machines and closed days are listed at 0. Attendant notes get the refund, matching and roll-up 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: refunds_owed refunds_owed_total unpaid_cycles faulty_machines takings_by_machine takings_by_day

Setup notes: Batch 41 case tp01-laundromat-machine-takings-reconciliation (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 2274328526). 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 0.32 (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: $0.058487. Score: 6/6. 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: 17s
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	59,356	1,909	$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: refunds_owed refunds_owed_total unpaid_cycles faulty_machines takings_by_machine takings_by_day
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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  "modelUsage": {
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    "canonicalModel": "claude-sonnet-5-5",
    "provider": "firstParty",
    "costBasis": "list"
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  },
  "permission_denials": [],
  "terminal_reason": "completed",
  "fast_mode_state": "off",
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  "subagent_stats": {
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  "subtype": "success",
  "api_error_status": null,
  "result": "I wrote `out/reconciliation.json`. I haven't checked the figures against anything beyond the script run itself.\n\n- **Refunds owed:** PY-317, PY-382, PY-627 and PY-781, totalling $14.50.\n- **Unpaid cycles:** CY-1056, CY-1092, CY-780, CY-880 and CY-897.\n- **Faulty machines:** only LM-26 has two or more unpaid cycles.\n- **Takings by machine:** LM-14 took $85.50, LM-17 $71.75, LM-20 $56.00, LM-23 $73.50, LM-26 $67.00, LM-29 $74.25 and LM-32 $71.00. LM-11 had no payments and is at 0.\n- **Takings by day:** every day from 2026-05-17 to 2026-05-23 is in the file, including any with no payments, at 0.\n\nI followed the rules in the task rather than `attendant-notes.txt`, where the two disagree. The notes say any unfinished cycle gets a refund, a payment only counts if the machine starts within about a minute, counter refunds should be ignored, and machines and days with no takings should be left out. I used the 5-minute window, the `power_cut`-only refund rule, subtracted counter refunds, and included zero-takings machines and days.\n\nAll 140 payments and 142 cycles fall within the period, so the date filter removed nothing.",
  "ttft_ms": 2038,
  "type": "result",
  "duration_ms": 15941,
  "uuid": "[REDACTED]",
  "ttft_stream_ms": 1415,
  "time_to_request_ms": 178,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 1416,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]