> For tasks that would take a human under four minutes—small bug fixes, boilerplate, simple implementations—AI can now do these with near-100% success. For tasks that would take a human around one hour, AI has a roughly 50% success rate. For tasks over four hours, it comes in below a 10% success rate
Opus 4.6 now does 12hr tasks with 50% success. The METR time horizon chart is insane… exponential progression.
How is success defined in those metrics? Is success "perfect - can deploy to prod immediately" or "saved some arbitrary amount of engineering time"?
Anecdotal experience from my team of 15 engineers is we rarely get "perfect" but we do get enough to massive time savings across several common problem domains.
Really depends on what you're working in. For me, I work with a lot of data frameworks that are maybe underrepresented in these models' training sets and it still tends to get things wrong. The other issue is business logic is complex to describe in a prompt, to the point where giving it all the context and business logic for it to succeed is almost as much work as doing it myself. As a data engineer I still only find models to be useful with small chunks of code or filling in tedious boilerplate to get things moving.
Agreed. Common use cases like creating a simple LMS system Opus is shockingly good, saving hours upon hours from having to reinvent the wheel. Other things like simple queries to, and interactions with our ERP system it is still quite poor at, and increases development time rather than shortens it.
I feel like some of the data in this is horrendously out of date. They're referencing articles from the end of 2024.
There was a massive step-change in the capability of these models towards the end of 2025.
There is just no way that an experienced developer should be slower using the current tools. Doesn't match my experience at all.
The title of the article, though - absolutely true IMO
Yeah…
> For tasks that would take a human under four minutes—small bug fixes, boilerplate, simple implementations—AI can now do these with near-100% success. For tasks that would take a human around one hour, AI has a roughly 50% success rate. For tasks over four hours, it comes in below a 10% success rate
Opus 4.6 now does 12hr tasks with 50% success. The METR time horizon chart is insane… exponential progression.
How is success defined in those metrics? Is success "perfect - can deploy to prod immediately" or "saved some arbitrary amount of engineering time"?
Anecdotal experience from my team of 15 engineers is we rarely get "perfect" but we do get enough to massive time savings across several common problem domains.
Really depends on what you're working in. For me, I work with a lot of data frameworks that are maybe underrepresented in these models' training sets and it still tends to get things wrong. The other issue is business logic is complex to describe in a prompt, to the point where giving it all the context and business logic for it to succeed is almost as much work as doing it myself. As a data engineer I still only find models to be useful with small chunks of code or filling in tedious boilerplate to get things moving.
Agreed. Common use cases like creating a simple LMS system Opus is shockingly good, saving hours upon hours from having to reinvent the wheel. Other things like simple queries to, and interactions with our ERP system it is still quite poor at, and increases development time rather than shortens it.