Equation 2 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Claude Code and Agentic Development Tools
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Symbol T_50
the length of task, measured in human-hours, that a frontier agent could complete autonomously with 50% reliability at time t.
subscript
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
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What the article says around this equation
where is the length of task, measured in human-hours, that a frontier agent could complete autonomously with 50% reliability at time t . This is an empirical regression over six years of a specific evaluation methodology, not a law of nature, and METR’s own reporting is explicit that the trend could bend in either direction; it is included here because it is the clearest available answer to “how would you know if agentic coding tools were actually getting more autonomous,” as distinct from “how would you know if a vendor said so.”
Sources cited in the article section
- [5] SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues? ↗
- [14] Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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