Claude Sonnet 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Run fortnightly hourly payroll with overnight shifts, unpaid breaks, re-sent punches and a holiday

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

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first tryCompare

Estimated cost: $0.06
Wall time: 20s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Run hourly payroll for a two-week period Inputs: `employees.csv` (pay type and hourly rate), `punches.csv` (clock-in and clock-out times, local time) and `pay-period.json` (period, week starts, holidays). Report gross pay for every hourly employee for the two-week period. Salaried employees are paid elsewhere; leave them out. - Shift length = clock_out minus clock_in. A shift longer than 6 hours has a 30-minute unpaid break deducted. A shift of exactly 6 hours or less has none. - A shift belongs to the day and the week in which it starts, even if it ends after midnight. - The punch clock sometimes re-sends a punch: rows with the same employee and the same clock_in are one shift. - Overtime is time over 40 hours in one week (Monday to Sunday), paid at 1.5x the hourly rate. - Hours on a shift that starts on a holiday are paid at 2x and do not count toward the 40 hours. - Work in exact hours and minutes; round only the reported figures, to 2 decimals half-up. Write `out/payroll.json`: `{"gross_pay": {"<employee_id>": <pay>, ...}, "overtime_hours": {"<employee_id>": <hours>, ...}, "holiday_hours": {"<employee_id>": <hours>, ... only employees with holiday hours}, "total_gross": <sum of the rounded gross pay figures>}`. List every hourly employee who worked in `gross_pay` and `overtime_hours` (0 if none). ## 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.

Turn about 120-200 clock punches for 9-13 workers into gross pay for a two-week period. Overtime is weekly rather than per fortnight, breaks are deducted only above 6 hours, overnight shifts belong to their start day, the clock re-sends some punches, holiday hours are paid double and kept out of the overtime count, and salaried staff are mixed in. Pooling the fortnight, skipping the break, or counting duplicates each changes someone's pay. 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: gross_pay overtime holiday breaks_and_duplicates

Setup notes: Batch 20 case v01-hourly-payroll-overtime (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 299817100). 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 2.06 (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: $0.060727. 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: $0.06
Wall time: 20s
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	78,306	1,929	$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: gross_pay overtime holiday breaks_and_duplicates
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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  "stop_reason": "end_turn",
  "session_id": "[REDACTED]",
  "total_cost_usd": 0.0607265,
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   "cache_creation_input_tokens": 8613,
   "cache_read_input_tokens": 69685,
   "output_tokens": 1929,
   "output_tokens_details": {
    "thinking_tokens": 153
   },
   "server_tool_use": {
    "web_search_requests": 0,
    "web_fetch_requests": 0
   },
   "service_tier": "standard",
   "cache_creation": {
    "ephemeral_1h_input_tokens": 8613,
    "ephemeral_5m_input_tokens": 0
   },
   "inference_geo": "global",
   "iterations": [
    {
     "input_tokens": 2,
     "output_tokens": 440,
     "cache_read_input_tokens": 19597,
     "cache_creation_input_tokens": 1555,
     "cache_creation": {
      "ephemeral_5m_input_tokens": 0,
      "ephemeral_1h_input_tokens": 1555
     },
     "type": "message"
    }
   ],
   "speed": "standard",
   "fallback_credit": null
  },
  "modelUsage": {
   "claude-sonnet-5-5": {
    "inputTokens": 8,
    "outputTokens": 1929,
    "cacheReadInputTokens": 69685,
    "cacheCreationInputTokens": 8613,
    "webSearchRequests": 0,
    "costUSD": 0.0607265,
    "contextWindow": 1000000,
    "maxOutputTokens": 128000,
    "thinkingTokens": 153,
    "canonicalModel": "claude-sonnet-5-5",
    "provider": "firstParty",
    "costBasis": "list"
   }
  },
  "permission_denials": [],
  "terminal_reason": "completed",
  "fast_mode_state": "off",
  "fast_mode_disabled_reason": "sdk_opt_in_required",
  "subagent_stats": {
   "spawned": 0,
   "requested": {
    "background": 0,
    "foreground": 0,
    "unset": 0
   },
   "started_in_background": 0,
   "max_depth": 0,
   "spawned_by_subagents": 0,
   "completed": 0,
   "failed": 0,
   "killed": {
    "parent": 0,
    "user": 0,
    "system": 0
   },
   "refused": {
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    "concurrency_limit": 0,
    "budget": 0
   },
   "by_type": {}
  },
  "safety_stops": 0,
  "is_error": false,
  "num_turns": 4,
  "subtype": "success",
  "api_error_status": null,
  "result": "I wrote `out/payroll.json` with gross pay for the 10 hourly employees who worked, plus overtime hours, holiday hours and the total. Total gross is 25,222.87. I haven't checked individual figures by hand. The only check I ran was that the script flagged no conflicting duplicate punches and no shifts outside the period.\n\n- **Excluded:** the two salaried employees, E214 and E249. E235, E256 and E270 appear but have no holiday hours.\n- **Overtime:** only E221 (6.65 hours) and E270 (11.67 hours) went over 40 hours in a week. Everyone else is 0.\n- **Holiday:** 2026-10-12 is the holiday, so shifts starting that day are paid at 2x and kept out of the 40 hours. The 30-minute break deduction still applies to those shifts when they run over 6 hours.\n- **Duplicates:** re-sent punches (same employee and clock-in) were counted once. None had a different clock-out.\n- **Missing clock-outs:** three punch rows (E200 on 10-08, E207 on 10-08 and E214 on 10-09) have no clock-out and appear to be malformed lines. My script doesn't handle them specially. I didn't check whether the two hourly rows were counted or skipped, so E200's and E207's pay may be affected.",
  "ttft_ms": 3419,
  "type": "result",
  "duration_ms": 19264,
  "uuid": "[REDACTED]",
  "ttft_stream_ms": 2624,
  "time_to_request_ms": 329,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 2625,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]