Work out shift pay across the autumn clock change with breaks, night premium, weekly overtime and a holiday
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# Work out shift pay across the autumn clock change, with breaks, night premium, weekly overtime and a holiday Inputs: `shifts.csv` (employee, start_local, end_local, break_min), `rates.json` (base hourly rate per employee) and `holidays.json`. Times are local wall-clock times in America/New_York (the clocks went back from 02:00 to 01:00 on 2026-11-01). Everything is synthetic. These rules are the record; where `payroll-note.txt` disagrees, the rules win. Rules: - A shift's span is the real elapsed time between start_local and end_local, converted with the time zone's rules (not the difference of the clock readings). - Unpaid break: break_min, but at least 30 minutes when the span is more than 6 hours. The break comes off the end of the shift: the last break minutes of the span are not worked. - Classify each worked minute by the local wall-clock time at that real minute: night when the local hour is 22, 23 or 0-5; holiday when the local date is in holidays.json. - Weekly overtime: a shift belongs to the pay week (Monday to Sunday) of its start date. Worked minutes beyond 2400 in a pay week are overtime, taken from the chronologically last worked minutes of that week. - Pay per minute at base/60 × multiplier: 1 normally, 1.5 for overtime, 2 for holiday minutes (the higher multiplier applies, never both), plus a night premium of 0.25 × base/60 for every night minute on top. Gross is rounded half-up to the cent per employee. - Write `out/pay.json`: `{"<employee>": {"worked_hours": <h>, "overtime_hours": <h>, "night_hours": <h>, "holiday_hours": <h>, "gross": <dollars>}, ...}` with hours = minutes / 60 rounded half-up to 0.01. ## 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.
Pay three employees for two weeks of shifts that straddle the night the clocks go back. Shift lengths are real elapsed time, not clock differences, a minimum break applies to longer shifts and comes off the end, night and holiday minutes are classified by local time minute by minute, weekly overtime is the last minutes of each pay week, holiday and overtime multipliers don't stack, and the night premium sits on top. A payroll note gets the clock-change, break, overtime and stacking 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: clock_change_and_breaks night_minutes weekly_overtime holiday_minutes gross
Best model for this task so far: Claude Haiku 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) (success, $0.0064, 33s).
All runs (3)
100% pass rate across 3 eligible runs: 3 pass, 0 partial, 0 fail. Partial and failed runs are listed below with everything else.ⓘ
| Model | Cost | Time | Step-insⓘ | Autonomy | Outcome | Trustⓘ | Date | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AClaude Opus 5.5default · thinking on | $0.20 | 50s | 0 | Fully autonomous | pass | Trust 80% | 2026-10-24 | |
| AClaude Haiku 5.5default · thinking on | $0.0064 | 33s | 0 | Fully autonomous | pass | Trust 80% | 2026-10-24 | |
| AClaude Sonnet 5.5default · thinking on | $0.06 | 14s | 0 | Fully autonomous | pass | Trust 80% | 2026-10-24 |
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